How to Copy a Google Drive folder

Google Drive is the favourite cloud storage for most of us. Though it is well-rounded in terms of features, it lacks some essential ones people need. One such is copying a folder and its content. In other words, duplicating a folder.

However, you can make copies of files. Open Google Drive, select the files you want to copy, right-click and select Make a copy. You can also press Ctrl + C & Ctrl + V  (Cmd + C or Cmd + V if you are on a Mac) after selecting the files to get the same result.

This, in a way, can substitute copying a folder. After making the copies of files, you can select them, right-click and choose Organize → Move to move it to a folder of your choice.

The problem

There are three problems in following the above method.

1. You can only copy files that way.
2. The copied files will have the prefix Copy of.
3. The permission settings are lost.

If the folder you want to copy contains even one folder, Google Drive will start complaining that Folders can't be copied.

The copies of the files' name will have Copy of prefix. You may want to rename those Google Drive files.

I will explain three different ways to copy a folder and it's nested folders and files.

Copying folder using a workspace add-on

This is the simplest way you can copy a folder with its content in Google Drive. For this, you need to install a third party add-on called Copy folder in Google Drive.

1. Visit the add-on page and select install.
2. Choose your Google account to authorize access.
3. Open Google Drive and select the folder you want to copy.
4. In the side panel, select the add-on icon.
   
5. Select Change under destination folder.
   
6. Now, select the destination folder and choose save in the side panel.
   
7. Finally, select Start copying in the side panel to start the copying process.
   

If you want the copied folder files to have the same permission settings as the original, enable Keep file and folder permission before start copying the folder.

Copying folder using Rclone - a CLI tool

Rclone is a versatile open-source command-line tool that supports over 70 cloud storage providers including Google Drive. You will execute text commands in a terminal app to copy your Google Drive folders.

First, you need to install Rclone on your system. Then, you have to configure Rclone to connect with your Google Drive.

Let's say the name of your Google Drive remote is gdrive. You want to duplicate the folder PDFs inside My Drive > Business > 2024 > PDFs and put that in  My Drive > Business > 2025 > PDFs.

You can issue the following command in the terminal to achieve that.

rclone copy gdrive:Business/2024/PDFs gdrive:Business/2025/PDFs

If the folder name contains spaces, you need to escape them. For example, Personal stuff should become Personal\ stuff in the command.

rclone copy gdrive:Personal\ stuff/2024/photos gdrive:Personal\ stuff/2024/November/photos

You can issue the below command to copy only the files that changed in the last 24 hours.

rclone copy --max-age 24h gdrive:Business/2024/PDFs gdrive:Business/2025/PDFs

There's much more you can do with Rclone like creating image URLs, finding Google Drive folder size, etc. I will leave that for you to explore.

Copying a folder with Google Apps Script

If you are familiar with Google Apps Script, you can use this script written by Amit Agarwal to copy your folder.