Google Drive Updates & Release Notes

Previously available in beta, client-side encryption (CSE) customers can now conduct bulk migrations of sensitive files from both cloud and on-premises data sources. This process ensures confidential content is wrapped with customer-managed keys before it's imported into Google Workspace. Using this tooling, CSE customers can decommission their legacy third-party storage while ensuring the CSE model is in place throughout the document lifecycle. The API is highly configurable, we share a generalized sample code to make deployment simple, but customers can further customize it depending on their needs.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature will be ON by default for customers. Admins or authorized users will need to call the Drive API to leverage the feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more.
• End users: There is no end-user setting in Drive for this feature.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now

Availability

• Enterprise: Enterprise Plus
• Education: Education Standard and Plus
• Other Editions: Frontline Plus

Resources

• Google Workspace: Google Drive API overview
• Google Workspace: Manage client-side encrypted files with the Drive API
• Google Workspace: Best practices for bulk importing client-side encrypted files
• Code sample: GitHub, PyPI
• Keyword: Import sensitive external files to Google Drive with client-side encryption using the Drive API, launching in beta
• Knowledge: About client-side encryption

In March, we announced a beta for Ask Gemini in Drive. This feature is now generally available and has started rolling out to eligible Google Workspace and Google AI plans.

Google Drive isn’t just a place to store your work, it’s now the place to understand it. We’ve reimagined the experience with Gemini now offering a dedicated, immersive workspace designed for deep focus. You can now engage in high-context, multi-turn conversations to efficiently explore and understand content across Drive, Workspace apps, and the web.

Whether you are synthesizing years of client proposals or uncovering hidden customer trends, Ask Gemini in Drive provides a holistic view of your entire body of work.

Key features include:

• Dedicated conversations: Engage in focused discussions about specific sets of files and folders. By grounding your questions in the relevant content, you get more precise, actionable answers.
• Drive projects: Organize your work more effectively with Drive projects. This new feature in Drive allows you to curate related files and folders into a central, always up-to-date, and shared knowledge base, making it easier to manage complex workflows and keep your team aligned.
• Persistent conversation history: Easily pick up where you left off. Your past chats are saved, allowing you to quickly revisit previous insights about specific folders or projects without starting over.
• Secure and compliant: Ask Gemini in Drive and projects are built directly into the Drive architecture, it never copies or replicates your files. It honors your existing data protection and security controls, including access permissions, DLP policies, and IRM, ensuring Gemini only accesses content you are authorized to see.

Find and understand information across your Drive files, Workspace apps, and the entire internet

With this launch, we’re also expanding language support. Ask Gemini in Drive will roll out to all 29 languages currently supported in the Gemini side panel over the coming weeks (see the Rollout pace section below for more details).

Getting started

• Admins: This feature is available by default if Gemini for Workspace in Drive is enabled.
• End users: You must have Workspace smart features enabled to use Ask Gemini in Drive. Visit the Help Center to learn more about Ask Gemini in Drive.

Rollout pace

Ask Gemini in Drive in English:

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on April 22, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on May 6, 2026

Ask Gemini in Drive in 28 additional languages:

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on May 6, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on May 26, 2026

Availability

• Business: Business Standard and Plus
• Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
• Consumer: Google AI Pro and Ultra
• AI Add-ons: Google AI Pro for Education

Resources

• Google Help: Use Gemini in Drive for research & analysis
• Google Workspace Blog: Introducing Workspace Intelligence

In March, we announced a beta for AI Overviews in Drive. This feature is now generally available and has started rolling out to eligible Google Workspace and Google AI plans.

Instead of searching through endless files and opening dozens of tabs to find the information you need, you can now get instant answers right at the top of your search results. Gemini does the heavy lifting for you, scanning your documents to provide clear, reliable summaries.

Here is how it helps you work smarter:

• See the big picture: Get a quick summary of information pulled from multiple files without needing to open each one.
• Ask naturally: There’s no need to use complicated search tricks. Just ask a question as you would to a colleague, like "What’s in our Spring 2026 catalog?"
• Get the right answer: Gemini automatically understands what you’re looking for, whether it’s a quick fact, a project summary, or a list of specific documents, and adjusts its response to match.
• Dig deeper with ease: If you need more information, you can go from a quick summary to a deeper conversation with Gemini in just one click.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature is available by default if Gemini for Workspace in Drive is enabled.
• End users: You must have Workspace smart features enabled to use AI Overviews in Drive. Visit the Help Center to learn more about getting answers directly in Drive search.

Rollout pace

AI Overviews in Drive in English:

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on April 22, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on May 7, 2026

AI Overviews in Drive in 28 additional languages:

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on May 6, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on May 26, 2026

Availability

• Business: Business Standard and Plus
• Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
• Consumer: Google AI Pro and Ultra
• AI Add-ons: Google AI Pro for Education

Resources

• Google Help: Search & retrieve your files in Drive with Gemini
• Google Workspace Blog: Introducing Workspace Intelligence

Last year, we stopped allowing restricted access on specific files and folders within a shared folder in Google Drive, and instead required that restricted access be managed consistently via the limited access folder setting. With this update, all items with legacy restricted access will be automatically migrated to use the limited access setting instead. There will be no change to who can see or access the files.

After the migration to the limited access setting, any user can audit the files they own with limited access by using the Drive search operators owner:me is:limitedaccess.

Items that were automatically migrated will show limited access was applied by Google Drive.

Items with limited access applied will show the updated sharing experience.

Getting started

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more.
• End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Rollout pace

• Personal Google accounts: Available now
• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on April 9, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on April 16, 2026

Availability

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

• Google Help: Learn about limited access to files and folders in Google Drive
• Google Workspace Updates Blog: Upcoming Change to Drive Sharing Permissions

In September 2025, we launched ransomware detection and file restoration in beta to help organizations minimize the impact of malware attacks on personal computers. Today, we’re excited to share these two features are generally available with significant improvements in malware detection.

Compared to when the feature was in beta, we are now able to detect even more types of ransomware encryption and are able to do it faster. Our latest AI model is detecting 14x more infections, leading to even more comprehensive protection.

Thousands of users have tested file restoration, demonstrating that it’s scalable and reliable.

• Ransomware detection: When users have Google Drive for desktop installed on their computers, file syncing will be paused when ransomware is detected. The user will see a notification appear on their computer. Admins will see an alert in the Admin console security center; notification emails will be delivered to both users and admins.
• File restoration: Users are able to bulk restore their files to a previous version in Drive with ease, saving them time and money without paying a ransom. Users can select and restore multiple files prior to when ransomware infected their computer, making their files inaccessible.

Getting started

• Admins:

  • Ransomware detection will be on by default for users in your organization. You can turn it on or off at the OU level by going to Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Malware and Ransomware. If ransomware is detected for your users, admins will receive an email and get an alert in the Alert center.
  • Drive file restoration will be on by default. You can turn it on or off at Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Drive file restoration.
  • Install the latest version of Drive for desktop on user computers (v.114 or later) to enable the detection alerts (syncing will still be paused on older versions).
  • Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing ransomware detection and file restoration for your organization.

• End users: The availability of this feature will depend on your admin’s settings. If turned on and ransomware is detected, you will see the alerts and access the interface below. Visit the Help Center to learn more about restoring files in bulk with Google Drive.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now

Availability

• File restoration
  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts
• Ransomware detection
  • Business: Business Standard and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard and Plus
  • Education: Education Standard and Plus
  • Other Editions: Frontline Standard and Plus

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Detect ransomware and recover files in Drive for desktop
• Google Help: Restore files in bulk with Google Drive
• Workspace Blog: Block ransomware proliferation and easily restore files with AI in Google Drive
• Google Workspace Updates Blog: Ransomware detection and file restoration for Google Drive available in beta

Last year, we announced a smoother, more modern video player in the Google Drive Android app. This updated look and feel is now available when watching Drive videos on your iOS devices.

Getting started

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: Visit the Help Center to learn more about storing & playing video in Google Drive.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now

Availability

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

On Chrome on your computer, you can now save PDFs directly to Drive without leaving the page, and easily get back to them later in the “Saved from Chrome” folder. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Getting started

• Admins: Chrome admins can control this feature using this policy, starting from version 145.

• End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more about saving PDFs from Chrome to Google Drive.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now

Availability

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

• Google Drive Help: Upload files & folders to Google Drive

We're excited to announce a major improvement to Microsoft Office interoperability in Google Workspace: you can now edit Microsoft Office files that are password-protected, directly within Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

When a user attempts to open a protected file in Drive, they will be prompted to enter the password with the option to View or Edit. Selecting “Preview” opens the document in read-only Preview mode without removing the password. New with this launch is the option to Edit, which will open the file for editing in Docs/Sheets/Slides and remove the password from the file.

This enables better interoperability between Workspace and Microsoft, allowing users for the first time to edit password protected files directly in Drive. Prior to this, users would have to download and rely on third party applications to remove passwords or edit password protected Microsoft files.

Getting started

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: Visit the Help Center for more info on using this feature.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release domains: Full rollout (1–4 days for feature visibility) starting on January 13, 2026, and ending on January 16, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1-3 days for feature visibility) starting on January 19, 2026, and ending January 21, 2026

Availability

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

• Google Docs Editors Help: Edit an Office file directly in Docs, Sheets, or Slides

What’s changing

We previously announced an open beta for migrating files from Dropbox to Google Drive in the New Data Migration service. This functionality is now generally available.

Admins can use the New Data Migration service to migrate data from Dropbox business accounts, including files, folders and associated permissions, helping organizations transition to Google Workspace quickly and easily.

Example of a running Dropbox migration

Additional details

• You can migrate data from up to 150 Dropbox users or team folders at a time to MyDrive or Google shared drives respectively.
• You can find comprehensive reporting on migration progress, including site and file counts (migrated/skipped). You can also export migration reports for error investigation and troubleshooting.
• Delta updates are available to migrate newly added or updated files.

Getting started

• Super Admins: You can find this new solution in the Admin console under Menu > Data > Data Import & export > Data Migration (New). Visit the Help Center to learn more about Dropbox to Google Drive migration and new Data Migration Service.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:
• Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus
• Education Fundamentals, Standard, Plus
• Nonprofits

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Migrate files from Dropbox

Google Drive is making significant improvements to the viewing experience of third party file formats, such as PDFs, videos, images, and audio files. With this launch, we are modernizing the interface to include:

• A new left rail for PDFs which will include a table of contents (where applicable) and thumbnails for easier navigation of documents
• A new file menu
• A new toolbar and app bar
• An option to search by transcript when looking at a video

This modernization will make it easier for Google Workspace users to navigate documents, and will be particularly useful for large documents.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature will be on by default. There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: This feature will be on by default. You will see it when you open a supported file format in a new tab in Google Drive on the web. Use our Help Center to learn more about how to use Google Drive.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release domains: Available now
• Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility starting on December 11, 2025

Availability

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

• Google Help: How to use Google Drive

Beginning today, a Drive item’s applied data classification values will appear across all views on Drive on the web, including Home, My Drive, Shared Drives, and Drive search results. Previously, users needed to either navigate to Details or open the file to know a Drive item’s classification state. Now, users will immediately see the applied classification values when navigating throughout the Drive product.

For any particular item, the highest ranked label with a badged list field will display the applied option. For items with more than one label applied, an additional label count icon will appear next to the badged value displaying the number of additional labels applied to the item. For items where only data classification labels without badged lists are applied, the Label name of the highest rank classification label will appear next to the file title with a non-colored badge treatment. It’s important to note that only options from badged lists will display within Workspace surfaces; a label without a badged list will display the label name.

Hovering over either the badged label value or the additional count icon will display additional applied labels in a tooltip. Clicking a label value will immediately open the Labels section of File Details.

Getting started

• Admins:
  • If you've been using classification labels, there are no changes to your experience beyond improved end user visibility of applied labels.
  • There is no admin control for this feature; however, you are able to adjust whether a label contains a badged option list and specify a color scheme within the Label Manager.
• End users:
  No action needed. Labels will start to appear on Drive items across all supported views.

Rollout pace

• Available now

Availability

Data classification labels in Drive are available to Google Workspace:

• Frontline Starter and Standard
• Business Standard and Plus
• Enterprise Standard and Plus
• Education Standard and Education Plus
• Nonprofits
• Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Get Started as a Classification label admin
• Google for Developers: Labels Overview

Overview

Last year, we announced the ability to automatically generate captions for English-language videos in Google Drive. Today, we’re expanding this feature to support 27 additional languages.

This update makes video content stored in Drive more accessible, inclusive, and easier to understand for all users, especially those who are deaf or hard of hearing, are in a noisy environment, or speak a different primary language. Automatically generated captions also save time by eliminating the need for manual caption creation and make it easier to search for video content.

When an eligible user uploads a video to Drive, this feature will automatically detect if the video is in one of the supported languages and generate captions for it.

The new languages supported are:

• Arabic
• Czech
• Dutch
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Malay
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Support for Chinese is coming soon.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature expansion will be ON by default for all eligible organizations and will respect your existing settings for automatically-generated captions. No new admin control is being added. You can control this feature for your organization at the domain, OU, or group level. Admins can choose to:
  • Have captions generated automatically when a user uploads a video (default)
  • Turn on the feature, but require users to request captions for each video
  • Disable automatically-generated captions entirely
• End users: For end users at organizations where automatic generation on upload is enabled, captions in these new languages will be generated automatically upon video upload. No action is required. End users who need to request captions (including users with personal Google accounts) can generate captions by doing the following: right-click the video > Manage caption tracks > Add new caption tracks. Visit the Help Center to learn more about automatically generated captions.

Rollout pace

• Available now

Availability

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Google Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Visit the Help Center to learn more about turning automatically-generated captions for videos in Drive on or off.

Beginning today, the new Data Migration Service can be used to migrate files and folders from Dropbox to Google Drive. This allows organizations to transition easily from Dropbox to Google Workspace, by copying over files, folders and associated permissions securely.

You can start and complete a migration in a few simple steps:

• Connect to your Dropbox business account from which you want to copy data.
• Specify which users or team folders you want to copy from and which user’s MyDrive or Google shared drive should contain the copied data.
• Specify users and groups whose permissions should be copied.

Example of a running Dropbox to Google Drive migration

Additional details

• You can migrate data from up to 100 Dropbox users or team folders at a time to MyDrive or Google shared drives respectively.
• You can find comprehensive reporting on migration progress, including site and file counts (migrated/skipped). You can also export migration reports for error investigation and troubleshooting.
• Delta updates are available to migrate newly added or updated files.

Getting started

• Admins: You can find this new solution in the Admin console under Menu > Data > Data Import & export > Data Migration (New). Visit the Help Center to learn more about Dropbox to Google Drive migration and new Data Migration Service.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) started on November 10, 2025

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:

• Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus
• Education Fundamentals, Standard, Plus
• Nonprofits

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Migrate files from Dropbox (beta)

What’s changing

We previously introduced the option to set expirations on files that reside in shared drives using the Google Drive API. Today, we are bringing the ability to set expiring access for files and folders in shared drives directly from the sharing dialog. This highly-requested feature brings the ease and security of My Drive access controls into your collaborative shared drives.

File expirations

You can now set expirations when sharing files in a shared drive. This lets you add an expiration date right in the sharing dialog for temporary collaborators, ensuring access is automatically revoked and eliminating the need for manual cleanup.

Add expiration while sharing files in shared drives.

Folder expirations

For shared drive folders, you can now apply an expiration date specifically to the Viewer role. This setting is easily accessible in the folder's sharing dialog, helping you automatically remove read-only access when a collaborator's temporary need is finished.

Consistent expiration behavior in My Drive

We're standardizing access expiration for files and folders in My Drive. The experience is now consistent with shared drives, making it more predictable for you to know when access will expire.

Old behavior:
If you granted someone temporary Editor access to a file inside a parent folder they could only view, they would lose all access to the file once their Editor permission expired.

New behavior:
When their temporary Editor access expires, their permission will revert to the access they have on the parent folder (in this case, Viewer). They will not lose access to the file completely.
Editor access expires, and reverts to Viewer access (user has Viewer access on the parent folder).

Getting started

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: This feature will be available by default. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how to manage expiring access in shared drives.

You can only set sharing expirations on Web and Android phones. Expirations cannot be set on iOS devices in My Drive or shared drives.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 4, 2025
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 18, 2025

Availability

Available to Google Workspace:

• Business Starter, Standard, Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus
• Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus
• Education Standard, Plus
• Nonprofits
• Frontline Starter, Standard, Plus

Also available to:

• Google One AI Premium
• Google AI Pro and Ultra
• Gemini Business, Enterprise*

*As of January 15, 2025, we’re no longer offering the Gemini Business and Gemini Enterprise add-ons for sale. Please refer to this announcement for more details.

Resources

• Google Help: Share folders in Google Drive
• Google Learning Center: Set an expiration date for file access

New features to help organizations minimize ransomware impact

We’re adding two new features to help organizations minimize the impact of ransomware attacks on personal computers. Specifically, we are adding these features in beta:

• Ransomware detection: When users have Google Drive for desktop installed on their computers, file syncing will be paused when ransomware is detected. The user will see a notification appear on their computer. Admins will see an alert in the Admin console security center. And notification emails will be delivered to both users and admins.
• File restoration: Users are able to restore their files to a previous version in Drive with ease, saving them time and money without paying a ransom. Users can select and restore multiple files prior to when ransomware infected their computer, making their files inaccessible.

Getting started

Admins:

• Ransomware detection will be on by default for users in your organization. You can turn it on or off at the OU level by going to Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Malware and Ransomware. If ransomware is detected for your users, admins will receive an email and get an alert in the Alert center.
• Drive file restoration will be on by default. You can turn it on or off at Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Drive file restoration.
• Install the latest version of Drive for desktop on user computers (v.114 or later) to enable the detection alerts (syncing will still be paused on older versions).
• Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing ransomware detection and file restoration for your organization.

End users:

• The availability of this feature will depend on your admin’s settings. If turned on and ransomware is detected, you will see the alerts and access the interface below.
• Use the Help Center to learn more about restoring files in bulk with Google Drive.

Rollout pace

Admin console setting

• Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on September 30, 2025.

File detection and restoration features

• Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on October 14, 2025.

Availability

File restoration

• Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Ransomware detection
Available for Google Workspace:

• Business Standard, Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus
• Education Standard and Plus
• Frontline Standard and Plus

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Detect ransomware and recover files in Drive for desktop
• Google Help: Restore files in bulk with Google Drive
• Workspace blog: Block ransomware proliferation and easily restore files with AI in Google Drive