Bandwidth & Efficiency

How to Copy a Google Drive Folder Without Downloading Locally

Published: October 19, 2026 Reading time: 3 min Author: MyDrive Copier Engineering

The Bandwidth Trap

When you need a personal copy of a 40GB Google Drive folder, clicking "Download" forces your computer to download 40GB of data, extract multiple ZIP files onto your hard drive, and upload 40GB back to Google Drive—burning 80GB of total network bandwidth and hours of computer uptime.

0 GB

Local Bandwidth Used

0 MB

Hard Drive Space Consumed

100%

Native Docs Preserved

Why Downloading Google Drive Folders is a Bad Idea

When you attempt to duplicate a folder using the manual download-and-reupload approach, you encounter three major technical penalties:

1. The 2GB Multi-Part ZIP Nightmare

Google Drive automatically segments large folders into separate 2GB archive chunks (drive-download-001.zip, drive-download-002.zip, etc.). If any packet drops during the multi-gigabyte browser download, the entire file corrupts. Furthermore, extracting multiple archives often scatters nested files into broken directories.

2. Permanent Degradation of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google Drive does not store Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides as static binary files. They are live cloud database entities. When you download them, Google forces a conversion:

Google Docs $\rightarrow$ Microsoft Word (.docx)
Google Sheets $\rightarrow$ Microsoft Excel (.xlsx)
Google Slides $\rightarrow$ Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx)

When you re-upload these files back into Google Drive, you lose document revision history, real-time collaboration links, inline comments, and specific formatting that does not translate cleanly across formats.

3. Disk Space Exhaustion on Laptops

If your laptop has a 256GB or 512GB SSD and you are trying to duplicate a 60GB shared research or video production repository, you need at least 120GB of free space (60GB for the ZIP files, plus 60GB for unzipping).

How Pure Cloud-to-Cloud Copying Works Under the Hood

The Google Drive API v3 provides a native method called files.copy. When this API endpoint is called with a source fileId and destination parents array, Google's data centers duplicate the file pointer and storage blocks internally.

The file content never leaves Google's network! Your browser simply sends a tiny HTTP POST request containing a few hundred bytes of JSON metadata:

POST https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files/{fileId}/copy

Google's cloud creates the new copy in milliseconds. Even for a 10GB video file, the cloud copy occurs almost instantaneously on Google's internal storage cluster.

Step-by-Step: Copying Entire Folders Without Downloading

1 Install MyDrive Copier for Chrome

Add MyDrive Copier from the Chrome Web Store.

2 Navigate to the Folder in Google Drive

Open Google Drive in Chrome and click into the folder you want to copy (whether inside your own Drive or in "Shared with me").

3 Auto-Detect and Start Copy

Click the MyDrive Copier extension icon and click "Auto-Detect Tab". Click "Start Recursive Copy".

MyDrive Copier executes a concurrent worker pool that traverses all nested subfolders, generates matching directory trees in your Drive, and calls Google's cloud-copy endpoint for every file.

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