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A bit tangential, but, recently my partner had her Google Drive with around ~3.000 files in the root folder (created mostly by Google Classroom), which means th

by etra0 4y ago

A bit tangential, but, recently my partner had her Google Drive with around ~3.000 files in the root folder (created mostly by Google Classroom), which means the Files app of the iPad couldn't show them all, because for some reason it limits to 500 files only. So naturally the next step was to try to clean the directory. We tried through the webpage, deleting by chunks of 300 files consumed around ~8GB of RAM... and it was slow as hell, and her laptop is a bit old. I moved onto my desktop and selecting 500 files consumed ~10GB of RAM, it was still slow. I thought of using Google Colab to access to the Drive as filesystem but no dice there either because the google account wasn't managed by her. At the end, we tried the iPad app, it took like 8 minutes to be able to select all files, and when deleting them, it took about an hour to actually do it, I imagine it was submitted by batches. It was stupidly painful.

Nextgrid 4y ago
FYI, "rclone" is a good tool to access proprietary cloud storage platforms from a consistent CLI.
- Shared404 4y ago
  +1 Mounted a google drive as an FS on a linux box a while ago, worked very nicely.
crazygringo 4y ago
In case anybody else ever needs to do this, install the official Google Drive for Desktop client on a Mac or PC, and set it to stream (not mirror). And then just use the command-line to delete everything in one fell swoop. GUI file managers are generally not designed for many thousands of files, especially web/mobile ones. That's very strange that Classroom was creating files in root, however. It's supposed to create them in a single "Classroom" folder in root. You can move the folder if you like (e.g. as a subfolder) but there shouldn't even be any way to point Classroom to use the root-level folder for classes/assignments. (Plus the internal folder structure is hierarchical by class/assignment, so there also shouldn't be thousands of files/folders in a folder in any part of it.)

by etra0 4y ago

Nextgrid 4y ago

FYI, "rclone" is a good tool to access proprietary cloud storage platforms from a consistent CLI.

Shared404 4y ago
+1 Mounted a google drive as an FS on a linux box a while ago, worked very nicely.

crazygringo 4y ago

In case anybody else ever needs to do this, install the official Google Drive for Desktop client on a Mac or PC, and set it to stream (not mirror). And then just use the command-line to delete everything in one fell swoop. GUI file managers are generally not designed for many thousands of files, especially web/mobile ones. That's very strange that Classroom was creating files in root, however. It's supposed to create them in a single "Classroom" folder in root. You can move the folder if you like (e.g. as a subfolder) but there shouldn't even be any way to point Classroom to use the root-level folder for classes/assignments. (Plus the internal folder structure is hierarchical by class/assignment, so there also shouldn't be thousands of files/folders in a folder in any part of it.)