For Google Workspace users on Rapid and Scheduled Release domains, the company has begun rolling out support for scheduling daily exports of Google Drive inventory to BigQuery.
Exporting this data allows admins to get a handle on their organization"s files, providing a detailed look into how data is classified, who can access it, and how it gets used. The inventory itself contains metadata for each file, like its size and applied labels, but not the actual content of the files.
Google says that this feature is off by default and has to be enabled at the domain level. If your organization already has a weekly export running, you can change the schedule from Weekly to Daily by navigating to the "Export Schedule" section inside the Drive inventory exports settings.
You also need to have billing set up for your Google Cloud project because storing and querying all that metadata in BigQuery costs money; Google estimates that the metadata for one million files will use about 1.5 GB of storage.
If Drive inventory exports are disabled for your organization, an administrator can enable them through the following steps:
- Navigate to Menu, then Reporting, and finally Data integrations.
- Select Drive Inventory Exports.
- Check the box to enable the exports.
- Under BigQuery project ID, choose the project for storing the export. If the project is not visible, it needs to be configured correctly in the Google Cloud console first.
- In the field for the existing dataset, enter the name of the dataset you plan to use.
- Click Save. If you hit an error, it could be because your account lacks the Project IAM Admin role on the Google Cloud project. After the initial setup, the first export can take one to two weeks to appear.
After enabling the exports, it is worth noting that the data has a default expiration time of 60 days, after which it is deleted from Google Cloud. This can be changed inside your BigQuery settings.
One final thing to keep in mind is that the exported inventory data may not include videos created with Google Vids or any unclaimed Jamboard files.
As for the Workspace subscribers who have access, the editions are: Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, Frontline Plus, Education Standard and Education Plus, Enterprise Essentials Plus, and Cloud Identity Premium.