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Google Drive folders

If your files live in Google Drive, you can connect a Drive folder to a Lowkey project and keep the two in step. Agents work on the files as if they were local; their changes go back to Drive, and changes made in Drive come down to Lowkey. People who only use Google keep working in Drive as usual.

Before you start

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Drive sync comes from the Google Drive plugin. Your admin (or the Lowkey team) installs it and sets up the Google sign-in for it once, under Settings → Plugins. If you don’t see Google Drive there, ask them.

Connecting a folder

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A Drive folder gets a project of its own: start from a new, empty project. Lowkey refuses to connect a folder to a project that already has files in it, so nothing in Drive can collide with work that’s already there.

  1. Create a new project for the folder.
  2. In the project’s settings, under Plugins, turn on Google Drive.
  3. With the project open, go to Settings → Plugins → Google Drive and Connect your Google account. Google asks you to sign in and approve access. The approval covers your whole Drive, because Lowkey needs to read, create, update and move files to the trash in the folder you pick.
  4. In the same place, paste the Drive folder’s link (or its ID) into Google Drive folder URL or ID, then choose Validate and bind folder.

Lowkey then pulls the folder’s contents into the project. An agent can do most of this for you; the Google sign-in is the one step only you can do.

How syncing works

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  • Before an agent works, Lowkey checks Drive for changes and brings them down.
  • After an agent finishes, what it created or edited goes back up to Drive, as the same files, not copies.
  • Turns in the project wait for sync, so an agent never works from a half-updated folder.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

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Google’s own formats can’t be edited from outside Google, so they arrive as read-only copies in a .lowkey-drive-exports folder: Docs as Word and Markdown files, Sheets as CSV, Slides as PDF. Agents can read them; the originals are only ever changed in Google. Ordinary files (PDFs, Word files, images, text) sync both ways.

Safety rails

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  • Deleting goes to the trash. When a file is deleted in Lowkey, it goes to Drive’s trash, where you can restore it, never straight to permanent deletion.
  • Big deletes wait for you. If more than 25 files would be trashed at once, Lowkey holds them and asks first: Confirm bulk delete or Cancel bulk delete.
  • Conflicts keep both versions. If a file changed in Drive and in Lowkey at the same time, Lowkey keeps both and pauses that file. A “Google Drive sync conflict” card lists what needs sorting out; sync resumes for those files once you or the agent pick the right version.
  • Failed uploads say so. A file that couldn’t upload is listed on a card and retried, rather than silently skipped.

Sharing the project

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The folder syncs through the Google account of whoever connected it. In a shared project, turns started by other members sync using your connection, and Lowkey tells you this when you connect. If you disconnect, sync pauses: agents keep working, and their changes wait in the project until you reconnect.

Disconnecting a folder

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Unbind Drive folder stops syncing for good. The project keeps its files as plain local files, and the Drive folder is left as it is. A project can’t be bound again after that; to sync the folder again, connect it to a new project.

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