How to unshare multiple Google Drive files at once

Bulk actions offer you the superpowers to change access permissions across your whole Google Workspace domain at once. They come in handy when you want to clean up your Google Drive access permissions, or when you identify a specific problem with multiple files that needs to be addressed. Delete users from your Google Drive, remove sharing with certain domains, unshare all publicly available files or bulk change ownership of files. Just specify the criteria, select which files should change and it’s done.

How to add a bulk action

The bulk action functionality can be found in the Drive Audit dashboard of Florbs Security & Auditing solution.

By clicking on ‘bulk actions’ directly, you’ll be able to perform bulk actions for all files on your domain. Besides that, it shows an overview of previously performed bulk actions. By going to ‘audit files’ first, you will be able to perform bulk actions on files that match specific criteria.

 

Let’s use the second option as an example.

1) Select which files you want to change

To create a bulk action, you need to specify which files you want to change first.
This can be done with the extensive search functionality. Use specific filters like location, exposure, owner or search for something specific like a title.

After running a search, you determine whether you want to change specific files or all files that match your search query. Basically, it gives you the freedom to change almost all permissions within Google Drive: from a bulk change of all shared drive permissions to only removing external link sharing of certain users.

After selecting the files, click on the upper right button ‘add bulk action’. This triggers a confirmation of which files will be changed.

2) Specify which permissions need to be changed

After clicking ‘continue’ you select which permissions you want to change. There are a lot of options. You can remove specific people or groups from all these files at once, you can change all editors to viewers or even remove all permissions. If you identified orphaned files, you can use the ‘transfer ownership’ option as well. Pick a single option or add multiple changes within one bulk action.

3) Multiple Google Drive permissions are changed at once

The third screen shows an overview of the action you are about to perform. After adding a description of the action you are going to perform, you can run the bulk action. This description will be saved in the list of previously performed bulk actions.

Click ‘Create’ and that’s it! You’ve unshared all files that we’re publicly accessible at once.