How do I restore deleted documents from shared Google Drive folders?

Question

A non-privileged Google Drive user has accidentally removed a large number of files from folders shared across an organisation. They do not have permission to delete the files entirely, because they are not the owner. However, users with edit permissions are able to remove a file from a shared folder. This returns the user to the owner, but seems to leave the file orphaned without a parent folder.

The files were owned by various different users.

How do I restore these files to their correct folders? The Google Drive Audit Log does not contain enough information to restore the folders correctly - the parent folder ID is not included with the "Remove from folder" event.

Answer 1

Google Drive is included in the Reports API of the Google Apps Admin SDK. It provides similar information to the Google Drive Audit Log, but with additional metadata. That includes the parent folder ID of files which were removed.

To restore the files you should first query the Reports API for files removed by the user in question over the relevant time period, using the Activities:list method.

Then you'll need to setup a Google Apps service account (which is a little confusing), to allow you to impersonate the owners of the documents that were removed.

Lastly, you can iterate over the event report for the removed files and use the Files: patch method in Google Drive REST API, to re-add the parent ID's to each of the files.

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See Gist Using Google Drive API to restore files removed from shared folders for example of the last step.