This isn’t converting duplicate files to shortcuts - your workflow won’t change.
Google Drive allows files/folders to be in multiple locations at once. That’s not multiple copies of the file, that’s not shortcuts to a file with one real location, that is one file that is contained in two or more potentially-unrelated paths. Think of it as some kind of spatial anomaly.
A single file reachable by multiple non-shortcut paths is equally in all of those places. A shortcut to a file has one place for the “real” file and a bunch of references to that file. This change will pick a single spot for any files or folders you have that can be reached along multiple distinct file system paths, and put a shortcut to the new (single) path in all the places that used to refer to that file, but were not selected as its “real path”.
So, this has nothing to do with duplicates, and is unlikely to affect your use patterns.
I initially thought this was for duplicate files as well. After some research, I found that Google is replacing a file that has two parents with a shortcut. I wrote more details about my findings on my blog. https://cleandrive.app/google-drive-shortcuts-automatically-...
Google Drive allows files/folders to be in multiple locations at once. That’s not multiple copies of the file, that’s not shortcuts to a file with one real location, that is one file that is contained in two or more potentially-unrelated paths. Think of it as some kind of spatial anomaly.
A single file reachable by multiple non-shortcut paths is equally in all of those places. A shortcut to a file has one place for the “real” file and a bunch of references to that file. This change will pick a single spot for any files or folders you have that can be reached along multiple distinct file system paths, and put a shortcut to the new (single) path in all the places that used to refer to that file, but were not selected as its “real path”.
So, this has nothing to do with duplicates, and is unlikely to affect your use patterns.