Sources · Company source · export guide
Link a Google Drive folder to a Company Brain
Your company’s document estate is already on your disk if Drive for desktop keeps it there. Link the folder and every file becomes a note — without a copy, an upload or an API key.
What a Google Drive export holds — and what the brain makes of it
Install Google Drive for desktop, mark the My Drive or shared-drive folder "Available offline" (or unpack a Drive Takeout), and link it from Studio’s Sources. The brain builder reads every document in the folder into the same taxonomy as the Git docs source — category, type, the entity it concerns, versions and duplicates. Native Google Docs, Sheets and Slides come in as links to the online document (id and URL only); cloud-only placeholders are never opened.
The same local scanner tiers every file first: anything with credentials or dense personal data stays metadata-only. The account e-mail in Drive’s pointer files is never read.
Step by step
How to link Google Drive
Nothing is copied and nothing in the folder is changed: the brain reads it in place.
- 01
Install Google Drive for desktop and mark the folder “Available offline” — or unpack a Drive Takeout
- 02
Studio → Sources → Google Drive → Link folder…
- 03
Reseed
- 04
Press Reseed in Studio — or tell Claude Code or Codex “build my brain from this”. The source is detected by itself, even inside a combined archive.
Then, next month
An export is a snapshot. Drop a newer one and press Update: your edits and _notes/ are kept, and the update report says what changed.
Then ask it
What you can ask a brain built from Google Drive
Examples, not promises: the answer is whatever your notes hold, and every answer cites the notes it came from. The more exports you add, the more these questions cross sources.
- Which proposals in the sales folder are for accounts still in the pipeline?
- Which files are duplicated across two shared drives?
- Which documents concern this vendor, and which is the signed one?
limitOnly files that are actually on disk are read; a cloud-only placeholder is skipped, and native Docs are links, not text.
Good to know
The honest answers.
Does it use the Google Drive API? No, not for this source: it reads the folder Drive for desktop keeps on your machine. The optional docs-connector plugin can pull a Drive folder over the API into a mirror, and declares that network use in its manifest.
Are native Google Docs read? They become link notes (id and URL). Export them from Drive, or use a Takeout, if you want their text in the brain.
Start
Your company’s exports already exist. Turn them into a brain.
Free and open source on your own machine. Or hand us the exports — done-for-you onboarding is in early access.
Second Brain Studio · Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux · free · MIT
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