Has anyone discovered where/how offline Google Documents are stored when using Google Drive in Chrome? They must be stored locally but where?
Have tried the browser cache etc but can't see it unless I'm missing something very obvious!
To clarify, the file that is stored within 'My Documents/Google Drive' is a text file with a URL, what I am looking for is where the file that the URL points to is held when in offline mode.
It turns out the offline documents are stored in the HTML5 FileSystem.
The Chrome FileSystem storage is located here on my Windows 7 machine:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System
I added a number of large images to a document with the Chrome "Offline Docs" enabled and was able to see the FileSystem storage directory grow appropriately.
I then used the HTML5 FileSystem Explorer extension for Chrome to view the file structure of an offline document and was able to confirm that the images were, indeed being retrieved from the HTML5 FileSystem when Chrome was offline. See screenshot:
Further, it may interest you, the location where Google Drive stores offline docs in Android's file system.
sdcard/android/data/com.google.android.apps.docs/
Google Drive uses Chrome's IndexedDB for storing data about files. To see the contents, open developer console (Ctrl + Shift + I) and choose Resources tab.
This answer tells you about actual location of IndexedDB in the file system on Windows.
On Linux it's: ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/IndexedDB
On my computer (Windows 8.1 / Chrome version 41.0.2272.101 m) I found the filesystem at "C:\Users\my username\Appdata\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Profile 1\File System"
I needed to find it because I had some corrupted images in Google Slides (they worked on other computers or other browsers on my computer, just not in chrome on my computer). I deleted the File System directory and shazam, the images reloaded and were no longer corrupted.
Mine were all stored in
C:\users\%username%\Google Drive\
Have you downloaded Google Drive?
Offline access is available only when you’re using Chrome. See Setup Offline Access and Google Docs Offline. It seems like offline documents are encoded by Chrome and stored at some secret places, in order to force you to use Chrome.
Google drive stores the offline files in a folder called... android/data/com.google.android.apps.docs/files/pinned_docs_files_do_not_edit/
in that folder u will find the desired files.
Please be aware that...
The files that you will find can be of two formats..
1) encrypted
2) open type
If you have left unchecked the option to encrypt (by default in google drive) the files that u downloaded will be visible, but not accessible by the standard reader. every attempt to read it will be result in a failed operation.
But ... if you DISABLED the encryption in google drive, u will be able to open freely with any type of reader.
Related
I am not able to save a new notebook in my Google Drive environment.
Google Colaboratory works with predefined notebooks such as Hello, Colaboratory, but I am not able to save any into my Drive folder.
I have the Colaboratory app allowed in the Google Drive settings and really dont know how to solve it. Colaboratory communicates with Drive - it even creates the notebook files in the Google Drives folder, but when loading any notebook file it always report following Notebook loading error
There was an error loading this notebook. Ensure that the file is accessible and try again.
Neither the details of the error help much:
Failed to fetch TypeError: Failed to fetch
I was playing with the access rights of both the file and the folder and could not find any solution.
Update: Chrome 64.0.3282.167 (64 bit); Windows 10 1709. I use two users on the Chrome. Creating Notebooks works normally on different computers with my username.
This is the output from console:
Chrome Console Output
On Google Chrome, I was seeing this issue randomly and it mentioned not being able to load the file /some/google/path/thats/gone/because/this/fixed/it/client.js. I tried clearing my cache and hard reloading, and sure enough, Colab starting working again.
As with standard cookies, third-party cookies are placed so that a site can remember something about you at a later time. Both are typically used to store surfing and personalization preferences and tracking information.
Google's colaboratory uses third party cookies and your browser most likely has them disabled.
Navigate to your browser settings, search for cookies and enable third party cookies. This should hopefully fix your problem.
I had the same problem, and I just disabled AdBlock on google Colab in everything works perfectly.
try to close/pause AdBlock and reload the page, it works for me.
I am trying to build a Google Chrome Extension which does the following -
1) Gets activated when someone visits my site say http://example.com
2) When someone downloads a file from my site , http://example.com, it starts monitoring that file for changes.
3) If the user edits and saves that file, it uploads the modified file back to the system.
My site is a niche document management system for a particular industry. Users dont want to downloads files, edit and then re-upload again. They want the files to be uploaded as soon as they save on their side. Its mostly for .docx, .xlsx files.
I tried to look at the Google chrome apis, but couldnt locate the appropriate ones. Any help would be useful.
Thanks!
As per your description, I believe chrome.downloads is what you want.
Use the chrome.downloads API to programmatically initiate, monitor, manipulate, and search for downloads.
To monitor, you could listen to chrome.downloads.onCreated and chrome.downloads.onChanged
Lets say I have a web URL to a file on a cloud storage (like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). How do I convert that to the corresponding file path on my pc? On Android? On iOS?
Assuming of course I have the utilities/apps installed locally.
EDIT: I interested in file name the reverse direction too. (I.e. when I have the local file path, what is the web path?)
EDIT 2: #Greg just made me realize that the problem with file name is much worse on Google Drive than on Dropbox.
And that is very bad. :-(
The reason? Google has good search capabilities on Drive and therefor I and many, many others have put their documents on Drive. However, once I found it I must locate it on my on computer/device. (If I want to edit a pdf for example.)
EDIT 3: #Dan McGrath kindly asked what parts remain unsolved.
Short answer: All. ;-)
Long answer: My actual use case, see below.
My actual use case is a Zotero web app. Zotero is a reference database where you store references to scientific articles, web pages, etc. The items stored in Zotero may include PDF files or - which I prefer - links to PDF files.
I just want to be able to easy access (read) this PDF files from any computer through the web app. And on my own computer I want to be able to edit the files with my local PDF editor. (Be it Android, Windows or whatever.)
By using a cloud storage I do not have to download/upload the files myself. The cloud storage takes care of that part.
For the "reverse" scenario, that is, you have a file and you want the Dropbox shared link, you can use this API endpoint, assuming you're connected to the account via the API:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#shares
My chrome app needs to save a file with human-readable or standard format such as SQLite (It should be readable outside Chrome).
Is there any API suitable for this purpose?
Some files with .localstorage extension (SQLite format) are in Chrome\User Data\Default\Local Storage folder. Is it possible to create such files by the app?
Edited: The app should not ask user for extra permission.
Thanks for your consideration.
chrome.fileSystem API is what you need.
You will need to ask the user at least once where to save the file, but then you can retain the entry to write again to the same file/folder.
There is no way around asking the user to "escape the sandbox".
You'll want to use the Quota Management API. This is per-origin storage, and you request specific amounts of quota.
It sounds like you also want your users to open the files directly? There's an HTML5 filesystem explorer Chrome app that you can use. It'll show you the files, and you can figure things out from their URLs (e.g. I'm currently using filesystem:http://localhost:8000/temporary/bar for a local experiment).
Or are you looking for something more user friendly? I think you have to use file save in that case, the same way Google Drive does.
I wonder how I could save a file on disk in a specific folder. Currently, I use HTML5 filesystem API to save and store my information inside the browser. But I'd like to save them on disk and in the same directory as the file that I edit. And without the prompt window.
Thank you in advance for your help!
Chrome Apps can do this via the chrome.fileSystem API. There is a huge amount of information on the web about how to use that API, including extensive documentation from Google. A quick web search should get you what you need.
(Chrome Apps have a lot of APIs not available to ordinary web apps.)
This would be considered a security issue. HTML5 only allows filesystems to be accessed from a protected area on your local drive controlled by the browser.
However, there are ways of storing data to this specified area temporarily or permanently.
window.webkitRequestFileSystem(window.TEMPORARY, 1024*1024, yourFile);
window.webkitRequestFileSystem(window.PERSISTENT , 1024*1024, yourFile);