PDF Versions in Google Drive

A colleague came to us this morning with an issue regarding Google Drive. She had a PDF in her Google Drive that she had created from a hard copy scan, and when she uploaded another PDF with the same name, she noticed Google Drive had replace the original file with the new file. I had a bit of familiarity with how to update a PDF in Google Drive to a new version manually (more on that later), but hadn't seen or noticed it happening automatically.

When I tested it out for myself, I saw that Google Drive had noticed the second PDF had the same exact name as the original, and updated the original one for me. It also provided this handy popup to inform me of the kind deed:

Of course, a lot of people just click right through those and continue working, but I figured if it's happening to one person, it's happening to others, too, so here is the blog post to cover you.

The solution we landed on comes from right-clicking the PDF in Google Drive, and then clicking "Manage versions…"

That will show a popup from which you can see previous versions:

If you click the "More actions" (three vertical dots) to the right of one of the file versions, you will see… well, more actions you can take:

Now for the ADDED VALUE feature of this post: look at the "UPLOAD NEW VERSION" button in the "Manage versions" popup above. You can manually update a PDF to a new version! That may not seem so exciting until and unless you have a link to a PDF in Google Docs appearing on a website(s), and need to update it. No need to update the URL - just upload a new version!