Connecting Code Buddy to Google Drive

Last Updated: September 2, 2026

Connecting Google Drive gives Code Buddy two folders to work with: one it writes your inspection records into, one your team imports site photos from. You choose both.

Shared drives work too. The folders can sit on a shared drive your company owns rather than in one person’s My Drive.

The backup folder

Code Buddy holds inspection data for a limited retention period and then deletes it. The backup folder is where your own copy goes, so your records outlive ours.

Each night, for every inspection completed that day, Code Buddy writes:

• the signal report as a PDF, the same document you read in the app
• the photographs as separate image files, at full resolution
• a manifest describing what the inspection contained

Backups are switched on under Data & Privacy, not on the integration screen. Choose the folder here, turn backups on there.

If your organisation and a project workspace both have a drive connected, the organisation’s copy is written as well as the project’s, never instead of it.

The photo folder

Point Code Buddy at a folder of site photographs and your team can run inspections against them without uploading anything by hand. Everyone in your organisation imports from that folder, and only from that folder.

Use an account your company owns

The connection acts as whoever authorises it. Point it at a personal account and your records live in one employee’s storage — when they leave and the account is closed, the folder goes with it.

Use a shared drive, or a Google Workspace account your company owns and holds the credentials for. Code Buddy warns you when the folder you are choosing sits in a personal account.

Connecting

1. In Code Buddy, go to Control Center → Integrations.
2. Find Google Drive and choose Connect.
3. Sign in with the account that should hold the folders, and approve access.
4. Choose your two folders. We recommend a fresh one for each — something like Code Buddy Reports and Site Photos.
5. Go to Data & Privacy and switch nightly backups on.

Shared drives

Browse into a shared drive when choosing your folders and Code Buddy will use it. If none appear, the account you connected either has none or is not on a plan that provides them. My Drive folders work exactly the same way.

Permissions

Code Buddy asks Google for drive.readonly and drive.file. These are account-wide read permissions, which is what allows the folder browser to list your folders so you can choose two of them.

Code Buddy confines itself to the two folders you choose, and that limit is enforced on our servers rather than by Google. This is why we recommend connecting an account that holds only what you are willing to have in scope.

Code Buddy reads:

• your folder list, so you can browse and choose the two folders
• the contents of the photo folder you chose
• your name and email, so the connection can be shown as belonging to someone

And writes:

• inspection records into the backup folder you chose

It does not read your mail, your calendar or your contacts, and it does not delete your files.

If something stops working

Backups stopped. Usually a full drive, or the destination folder was moved or deleted. Your administrators are alerted either way; choose a new folder under Integrations.

The connection stopped working. Usually the authorising account was disabled or its password changed. Reconnect — and if it was a personal account, move to one the company owns.

Need a hand?

Email ops@codebuddy.chat and tell us which organisation you are with and what you were trying to do.