Google Drive
| Google Drive | |
| |
| URL | http://drive.google.com/[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] |
| Status | Special case (Technically files are only becoming inaccessible) |
| Archiving status | In progress... |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| Project source | google-drive-grab, google-drive-items |
| Project tracker | google-drive |
| IRC channel | #googlecrash (on hackint) |
| Data[how to use] | archiveteam_googledrive |
Google Drive is a filehosting service, a la Dropbox, run by Google (not to be confused with Google Cloud Storage and similar more technical storage solutions). It is popular both for personal storage and for sharing of files.
2021 grab
Google Drive IDs are not random (anecdotally, IDs of folders in the same tree often share long parts), which makes them predictable, a problem which Google had been trying to rectify across its products (others of which have similar issues) throughout 2021[1]. As such, on September 13, 2021, Google required that, in order to access files and folders, users either have permissions tied to their signed-in Google Accounts, or access the item through a URL with a random per-item parameter called resourceKey, apparently introduced in 2021.[2] The result of this will be that at least millions of links across the Web will effectively break. Docs, Sheets and Slides will be exempted from this update [3] Apart from the longening links, the main threat was the users deleting files. Files are usually deleted to fit the users 15 GB limit.
Grab
The grab script had 3 item types, folder:, file:, and user:. It was intended that all folder: items be run first, to get a pool (through backfeed) of file: items, that can be randomly sampled to determine a size threshold that the Internet Archive will accept; then files will be run. Users contain some user metadata but not links to files or folders.
Playback is theoretically possible with a flexible, POST-capable Wayback Machine, but this does not yet exist. In the meantime, it may be possible to get files with vanilla wget or similar from the WBM. A tool is currently in development, with the Google Drive parts finished, to download from the Google Drive archives; contact OrIdow6 if you want a copy of the current state.
Results
(This is based on OrIdow6's very vague memories) It appeared that there were 2 types of Google Drive items, those that automatically got a redirect to a version with a resourceKey, and those that didn't. There was speculation that the latter, which had more random-looking IDs, would not suffer in the quasi-removal.