Searching Documents With Google Drive

Google Drive Document Access

Overview

Search for and download documents from Google Drive using rclone. Google Docs are automatically exported as Markdown for easy reading and processing.

Scripts are located at scripts/.

Reference Documentation:

• scripts/ — Shell scripts for search, download, and sync operations
• digital-science-reference.md — Digital Science documentation links

Authentication: See the Authentication section in digital-science-reference.md for rclone setup. The remote must be named gdrive.

Quick Start

# Check rclone is configured
./scripts/check_rclone.sh

# Search for files
./scripts/search_gdrive.sh "meeting notes"

# Search shared files
./scripts/search_gdrive.sh "standup" --shared

# Download a file (exports Google Docs as Markdown)
./scripts/download_gdrive.sh "Documents/Report" ./output

# Download by file ID
./scripts/download_gdrive.sh --id "FILE_ID" ./output

# Download matching shared files
./scripts/download_gdrive.sh --shared --include "pattern*" ./output

Common Tasks

Export Formats

Google Docs can be exported in different formats:

Example: ./scripts/download_gdrive.sh "Report" ./output --format docx

File ID Extraction

Extract file IDs from Google Drive URLs:

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/FILE_ID/edit → use FILE_ID
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/FILE_ID/view → use FILE_ID

Preview Before Download

Use dry-run to see what would be downloaded:

./scripts/download_gdrive.sh "Large Folder" ./output --bulk --dry-run

Direct rclone Commands

For advanced use cases:

rclone ls gdrive:"Documents"           # List files
rclone lsjson gdrive:"path" --no-traverse  # Get file info as JSON
rclone sync gdrive:"Source" ./local --drive-export-formats md  # Sync folder

Troubleshooting