Suppose you have a file that you share with multiple people in multiple folders on your drive. And there comes a need to frequently access the most updated version of that file.

Only if we have one master version of the file and its shortcuts distributed across folders, then managing it will become a lot more peaceful task. Assign one file to more than one folder in Google Drive An unknown feature of Google Drive lets you add a file to multiple folder locations but only symbolically. The master file will remain at a specific folder where its shortcut links can be made to other folders. This obviously isn’t copying, but this is maintaining files at different locations without duplicating it.

This comes very handy when you have updated one copy of it and all the instances of it get updated. Here’s how you can create a shortcut or multiple instances of the same file. • Select any file or folder.

You can also choose multiple files or folders by pressing Ctrl in Windows or Command key in Mac. • Now press ‘Shift+Z’ and you will see an ‘Add to folder’ pop-up. • Select the folder where you wish to create the reference of the selected files and folders, then click OK. You’ve neither copied nor moved files to that folder; you’ve just created a link to the file. To verify this method, right-click on the file and select Get Link. Now go to the copied location and get the link of that file too. Both the links will be same, indicating the file is same but just present at different locations.

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This feature is also useful when you have to create a copy of a folder but want to preserve space. Instead of duplicating it, you can create a reference copy with Shift+Z anytime. Click cross[x] next to each folder name to remove the file from the Drive folderAlternatively, it looks like is using symbolic links of Unix to implement this feature. If you drag the shortcut file to the original folder, it should remove the link automatically. To view which one is the original, just right click on the file and select “View Details” option.

It should show you the location of the original file. For some reason, Google has not included this option in right-click context menu. Perhaps it does not want users to get confused between this hidden ‘Add To’ option and ‘Create a Copy’ or ‘Move To’ option. But you can surely enjoy this neat trick anytime with just Shift+Z. Thanks very much for this post. It was very useful.

One suggestion is to update the post is the way in which to “Properly delete these shortcuts”. By right clicking on the shortcut (original or otherwise), you will see in Details part of the sidebar that pops up all the locations (folders) in which the shortcut can be found. By simply clicking on the cross that appears next to the instances that you want removed will remove the shortcut from that folder but not delete the file. Thanks again.

“Alternatively, it looks like Drive is using symbolic links of Unix to implement this feature.” You are wrong – it is not symlink (see below). In drive.google.com you can drog&drop file from one folder to another – it is ok – it moves file as user expects. But when during drag&drop you press CTRL you can see “plus icon” which means file will be copied instead of moved. Plus icon in most used operating system in the world Windows means that file will be really copied, but what does google it creates something strange – you can see file in the two different locations, but file is not really duplicated and also: – it is not known “symlink” (because deletion of symlink deletes just symlink, not original file) – it is not known “hardlink” (because deletion of hardlinked file means that file(s) in another location(s) is not deleted until count of hardlinks is zero).