GoogleDrive: how to copy a directory "verbatim", without exporting Google App files?

Hello everyone,

I'm using rclone copyto to copy a large Google Drive 'tree' (main directory with lots of subdirectories and files and more subdirectories, etc) from one of my Google accounts to another.

I see a lot of messages like this:
2019/05/11 18:46:56 DEBUG : REDACTED1/REDACTED2/REDACTED3/REDACTED4.xlsx: Updating size of doc after download to 12524

I investigated and this seems to happen because the file was created with one of the Google Apps (ie, Docs, Sheets, etc) and it seems rclone "exports" it to a "conventional" format (ie, Docs->.docx, Sheets->.xlsx, etc) and then copies this "exported" file to its destination.

As both source and destination reside on Google Drive, what I would really like is for the copy to be as identical as possible, ie that after the copy, the destination would contain the same Google Apps file (which would on the web browser with corresponding GoogleApp), not a file exported to some other format.

Is that possible?

Thanks in advance,
-- Durval.

It is a good question...

You can't download google docs in "native" format, you can only export them which means that there isn't a lossless way of copying google docs non server side.

So if you want a perfect copy you'll have to arrange for a server side copy.

Note that you can re-import the docs using this flag

  --drive-import-formats string      Comma separated list of preferred formats for uploading Google docs.

So they will be google docs again. They will have been through an export import cycle though.

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