Question

Uploading Google Docs into Preservica


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Our organization has recently adopted Google Drive for consistent storage. I can’t seem to upload Google Docs to Preservica. It would seem from browsing the community hub that Google Docs are not even documents! Does this mean I have to have a parallel storage of Microsoft Office to upload?

 


3 replies

Userlevel 1
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Can you save a Google doc to PDF and ingest it that way?

Userlevel 3
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Google docs (and spreadsheets and presentations etc) are only really accessible outside the google drive platform if you export a copy in a different format (we wrote a blog about this a while ago)

We don’t know the full details of how these applications work in the back end, but we believe that the content, history and layout/markup information are stored as data in (probably separate) databases and that there is no single “file” on a server anywhere that represents a single “document”.

If you can mount a google drive as a separate drive/folder on your local machine (as you can with DropBox and OneDrive), then you should be able to ingest content from there as you would from any other drive/folder, but that might only apply to content that started life as a file somewhere like a pdf or a jpg, and not include content which is “natively google”.

As Joan suggested, you will likely have to export/save as a docx/odt/pdf and ingest that.

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I used to have the same problem (uploading) with Slack and Google. They now have an app that can be installed that will allow documents from Google Drive to be uploaded as well as those from my own computer. Any hope of that happening? It will not solve the unknown changes to documents, but it would allow for easier uploading into the Preservica Archives.

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