Google sites and Google forms

Managed to get Rclone up and running I think with my Synology.

Before I go further with it and setup a huge sync I’m looking for some advice.

If I set up the Rclone to Sync 1 way from a Teamdrive to another Google account what will happen to the more unusual format files? For example Google sites? Google forms etc.

My thinking is that Rclone downloads the files, so sheets to xls; slides to ppt and then transfers them to the destination.

I essentially want to preserve the google websites and forms etc as google editable on the destination google drive. Can anyone clarify or make any suggestions?

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rclone won’t do that for you at the moment.

As far as I know you can’t download the original format of the Google sites, forms, docs, sheets etc, so rclone can’t copy them for you.

It might be possible to do a server side copy of them but rclone doesn’t implement that yet. I’m not sure a server side copy is possible across accounts - I think the only way you can copy them is share them to the other account then copy them into that account using the google website.

If you try a sync as it stands, then rclone will copy the things it understands (eg sheets) by downloading an .xls then uploading the .xls. This isn’t quite what you wanted… The things that don’t have an export format (like forms) rclone will just skip.

You can tell rclone to ignore the docs with --drive-skip-gdocs so get rclone to deal with the files and share and copy the docs?

I think it would be worth you having an experiment with copying your docs with rclone and see whether the result is acceptable or not!

Thanks for the through reply.

Certainly, Ill have a play. This will still be very useful to copy and backup a large number of files.

There is of course always Google Takeout but this results in similar where only some files are exported.

I will look at the Teamdrive sharing settings with another account and doing a copy on google’s side within a browser.

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Posting here to register that I would appreciate the ability to do server side copy between 2 remotes / accounts (using service account), so as to capture any type of Google Drive data. Or at least increased support for various types. Maybe Forms could be exported as / imported from XML, for example?

That could be done…

The formats that google can export are listed here: https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/manage-downloads

I think rclone does all of those already: https://github.com/ncw/rclone/blob/c496efe9a473db131d6960232ae308041f3f9e89/backend/drive/drive.go#L89

But I haven’t checked recently!