I’m attempting some fine management of text files I’ve mass-uploaded to Google Drive via desktop browser, with the Drive setting to automatically convert text and DOCX to Google Docs format upon upload. As many of you may have heard by now, the rules governing storage limits for free Google accounts have officially changed as of June 1st of this year. Prior to that date, all Google Doc files were free (didn’t count against the storage limit); now they technically do, although their implementation of the change doesn’t seem to be working consistently. For every batch of text files I upload these days, some varying percentage of them (I’ve seen 2–25% so far) display file sizes as Google Docs when viewed in Drive via web browser.
Sadly, although I also use Google Drive for Desktop, so can view all of my files in Drive via Directory Opus as well, all Google Docs are displayed as having the same size (151 bytes) when viewed that way.
Anyway, my goal is to delete only those Google Doc files which count against the storage limit, leaving the “free” ones in place, and then segregate my local copies of the original text files they were all converted from into separate folders to indicate whether or not they are successfully backed up to Drive without using storage, or not. Since there doesn’t seem to be any way to sort the Google Docs in Drive by file size, neither in browser nor in DOpus, I’m manually selecting all of the Google Docs which are indicated as having actual file sizes in the browser interface and moving them to a sub-folder named “Bad”. What I would like to do next is, in DOpus, copy the filenames of all files that I moved to “Bad”, then select all of the corresponding local files (substituting .gdoc with .txt), based on the filenames in the clipboard. Possible?
Try adding the local Google Drive folder path to Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced [Filesystem]: cloud_sync_paths and the sizes may work then (after opening a new window).
If not, do you see the sizes in File Explorer or are they all 151 bytes there as well?
Updating/reinstalling the Google Drive software may also be worth a try.
The size problem seems like an issue with Google Drive in that case. The size of the placeholder files is b being shown when it should be allowing Explorer and Opus to query the real sizes, but isn't. Not much we can do there.
You'll probably need to use scripting, but it's definitely possible.
There's a good example here showing how to get the text from the clipboard and then select files based on it:
You'd definitely need to modify that a bit (including to replace .gdoc with .txt, and you probably don't want the stuff at the start of the script), but it shows how to do the hardest parts.