Google Drive Url System Design

Question

I noticed this behavior on Google Drive.

When a link is created for a file on Google Drive, the link is valid until the file is deleted.

Moving the file to another folder(s) does not affect the behavior of url.

I will like to understand how they achieved this at scale.

Answer 1

This is an expected behavior when moving files to another folder within your google drive. This is because a google file URL is usually composed of the following:

• product domain
• product
• document Id

Therefore, moving the file to another folder within the google drive will not affect the file URL because file path is not included in the URL format.

References:

1. Google Sheets API Overview
2. Docs API