Moving the Google Drive folder

šŸŒŸFeatures
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Hello. Iā€™d like to know whether itā€™s possible to move the Dynalist folder from my Google Drive to a Google Drive subfolder? When I manually moved this folder, a new Dynalist folder was created as a primary folder the next day with my newest backup. Iā€™m asking because I like to keep my list of primary folders minimal.

Thanks very much! Iā€™m enjoying using Dynalist and have been telling many about it! :slight_smile:

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Hi @Brian_Rossiter, unfortunately thatā€™s not possible right now, as the path to backup is hardcoded right now. Unlike Dropbox, Google Drive doesnā€™t have an ā€œAppā€ folder that keeps all the third party stuff :frowning:

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Thank you kindly, Erica, for your response!

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I know this is an old question, but Iā€™ve got the exact same one so I figure better to keep the discussion in the one place.

Iā€™ve got a Backups folder in my GDrive where I would like to put my Dynalist backups. To keep everything neat and clean.

I guess this Help request needs to become a Feature request?

Thanks,

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this is precisely the reason I donā€™t rely googledrive for automatic backups, it gets so messy without having a dedicated subfolder path

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Moved.

@Shida: I guess the workaround would be to have an option that specifies the subpath?

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The thing with Google Drive is that they have a REALLY shitty API for accessing files and folders.

With Dropbox, for example, you can say upload to APPFOLDER + ā€˜/Backups/XYZ.zipā€™.

With google drive, thereā€™s no app folder, but thatā€™s not the worst part. The worst is that if you want to upload to say ā€˜/Dynalist/Backups/XYZ.zipā€™, you need to:

  • Query the root folder for ā€˜Dynalistā€™ Folder
  • If that doesnā€™t exist, create it, and get a folder id of the Dynalist folder
  • Query the ā€˜Dynalistā€™ folder for the ā€˜Backupsā€™ folder
  • If that doesnā€™t exist, create it, and get a folder id for that
  • Create file XYZ.zip under the ā€˜Backupsā€™ folder.

Now, as you can see, if you have an arbitrary folder ā€˜/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/XYZ.zipā€™, this step will be very long and very slow (because each step is a remote API call to one of Googleā€™s servers)

One alternative I can think of, is to allow the user to specify a ā€˜folder idā€™ to drop backups in. The user will have to somehow get it from google drive, but then once thatā€™s saved into Dynalist, weā€™ll try to upload files in that folder first. The advantage is that the user can move the folder anywhere even after saving the setting into Dynalist, and backups will still work. The downside is that if the folder is deleted, or anything happens to it, backups will stop rolling.

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I hate Google :frowning:

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I suspected the google drive API was bad based on all the ancedotal evidence Iā€™ve seen with people integrating into googledrive, but now you confirmed it :stuck_out_tongue:

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The Google Calendar API is not better. Thereā€™s a weird restriction that deleted events canā€™t be un-deleted, and item IDs must be unique, so weā€™re forced to kinda ā€˜saveā€™ an id for each itemā€™s date, and make sure to change it if the user ever deletes a date and re-adds it.

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Iā€™d really like to move the folder. I know itā€™s possible as Iā€™ve moved the folders from other programs/services and they still work fine. Examples include Google services like Maps or Play Books, or web apps like FileThis, or Join. Iā€™m not a programmer, but Iā€™ve tried a little Google Scripting and it seems you can just do a driveapp.searchFolders to find the folder. Help!

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Hi, thanks for the reply!

Have you looked at this reply, by any chance?

Also @Shida can you please take another look and see if itā€™s possible?

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Yea, saw that, and it sounds about right, but just because it isnā€™t as ā€˜niceā€™ as another API doesnā€™t mean it isnā€™t worth using. I believe DropBox is probably more path based by nature and Google Drive is more search based by nature, so of course in Drive youā€™ll need to search for what you want, even in the API. Maybe it takes a few more lines of code, but isnā€™t it worth it to have a more elegant feature that works the way the customers want?

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Iā€™m not the one who worked on the Google Drive sync, so Iā€™ll leave it to @Shida to decide whether itā€™s possible. The feasibility of that not only depend on if Google Drive API allows it, it also depends on how the Dynalist system works. From my impression it was next to impossible, and thatā€™s why we didnā€™t proceed with the plan. It wasnā€™t ā€œsomething that takes a few more lines of codeā€, otherwise weā€™d have done it already.

Thanks for providing the new information, weā€™ll have to evaluate it again. Thanks.

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I believe that for now, our system doesnā€™t store any information about your specific Google Drive account.

What we could do is to always search for a dynalist folder. If it exists, backups will be saved there, and otherwise we will create one at the root of the drive.

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Hmm, okay. Or at least for new users, we can save the folder id of the Dynalist backup folder? Is that possible?

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We donā€™t store anything from google drive, which is why we previously had to check for the folderā€™s existence every time. Search should be able to solve most of the problem though, as long as the folder isnā€™t renamed backups should go there just fine.

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[Edited: Oops, I see this was already suggested above. Sorry! But +1 on the idea!]

Would you be open to allowing the user to specify the parent folder via url, e.g.,
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B6wO23gPBY74Sm5rOUhhSlIwaTQ
and create/populate the dynalist folder under that location? (Iā€™m assuming thatā€™s the API-appropriate folder ID in the URL but could be totally off base here.)

I guess this might introduce the need for some additional error handling modes if that folder does not exist.

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Just saw this was implemented. Wow, that was fast! Thanks!!

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Thanks!

Please let us know if thereā€™s any issues with moving it. Thanks in advance!