Know Who Changed a File in Google Drive with Apps Script

Google Drive maintains a history of all edits made to a file and this information comes if you are trying to figure out who modified the files in your Google Drive. You can know the date and time when a file was modified, the name of the user who made the edit and their email address is available as well.

To get started, you need to enable the Advanced Google Drive API in the Google Services section of your Google Apps Script project. You can use the method to track revisions made to your Google Sheets, Presentations, Documents and other native Google Formats. The script can be further enhanced to send you email alerts as soon as a file is updated in Drive.

Also see: Get your Google Drive Activity Report

/* Credit: +Jean-Pierre Verhulst */

function listFileRevisions(fileID) {
  var editList = [],
    revisions = Drive.Revisions.list(fileID);

  if (revisions.items && revisions.items.length > 0) {
    for (var i = 0; i < revisions.items.length; i++) {
      var revision = revisions.items[i];
      editList.push([
        revision.id,
        new Date(revision.modifiedDate).toLocaleString(),
        revision.lastModifyingUserName,
        revision.lastModifyingUser.emailAddress,
      ]);
    }
    Logger.log(editList);
  } else {
    Logger.log('No file revisions found.');
  }
}
Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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