Google has announced that a change is coming to Google Drive to help cut down on duplicate files. The update is currently in Rapid release mode with a full roll out happening in a few weeks. Once it does, if you have file that you are trying to upload to your Drive with the same user name, that older version will be made a part of your revision history and not a separate file.
A common use case for Google Drive users is to download a file from their Drive to modify it locally, and then to re-upload the new version. In the past, this would result in duplicate files (the original and the new one), and users would have trouble finding the latest version. That’s why we’re introducing a change in Drive to deduplicate files which were uploaded in this way.
Once launched, when users upload files that have the same filename as an existing file, they’ll be deduplicated, and the old file will be in revision history. This is so that if any mistakes are made, users can get back to the previous version. Similarly, uploaded folders will be merged with folders of the same name.
What is interesting is that as a user you can keep the files separate if you choose to do so. Each time you upload a duplicate file, it will have a hyperlink in the notification window which you can
Google DeDuplicating of Google Drive Files
click to keep the files separate.
