Manage file revisions

Google Drive API provides the revisions resource so that you can download and publish file revisions. For more details about revision terminology, see Changes and revisions overview.

Specify revisions to save from auto delete

Google Drive automatically deletes older revisions that are no longer of interest to the user. To prevent this from happening, you can set the boolean flag keepRevisionForever to true to mark revisions that you don't want Drive to purge.

Download a revision

To download the latest revision, use the files.download method. For more information, see Manage long-running operations.

Publish a revision

To publish a Docs, Sheets, and Slides revision, set the published property for that file in the revisions resource. This property can't be set for Google Sites revisions using Drive API.

If the file is created in a Google Workspace domain, the publishedOutsideDomain property indicates whether the revision is accessible by anyone or if it's restricted to users of the domain. For Sites files, this property indicates whether a type=anyone permission exists.

Published revisions don't reflect changes made to a file unless the publishAuto property is set. If that property is set to true, newer revisions of a file are automatically published, overwriting the previous ones. This behavior is also controlled by the "Automatically re-publish when changes are made" checkbox in the Drive UI. For Sites files, publishAuto is always false.