Question: OK, I've looked everywhere for the answer for this and don't seem to be able to find it. 

We are trying to get our Google Drive organised so that the right people get access to the right things without a lot of explicit sharing. We have a top-level folder called "Company" with sub-folders for "Admin", "Finance", "HR", "Engineering" and so on. The sub-folders have more restrictive permissions than the top-level one.

We've now got more or less everything in the right place, and mostly this works. The problem is where individual files or folders have their own permissions - they then don't seem to inherit the permissions from their folders. How do we reset the permissions for *everything* in each part of the hierarchy so they are the same as the parent folder?

On Windows Server or Mac OS X there is a clear distinction between "inherited" and "explicit" permissions for an item, and it is easy to remove the "explicit" permissions for all the items in a hierarchy. Where is this for GD?

Answer: 
I found out that the best way was to use `rclone copy` to recreate the parent folder with all of it's files, while changing permissions into whatever default sharing settings you chose.

So if you have, say a team drive with a bunch of directories, just move everything into a new folder such as bad\_permissions. Then create a new remote in rclone for that drive and use `rclone copy gdrive:bad_permissions gdrive:fixed_permissions`. Since the copy happens server-side, you avoid having to download/upload.

**WARNING**:
I checked the copied folder with a file comparison tool afterwards to make sure everything had transferred properly and rclone actually had missed quite a large amount of files without displaying any errors.
<http://gappstips.com/docs-tips/view/98/protect-your-google-drive-folders-by-setting-permissions>

according to that link it seems like you need to make sure the files are set to the default permissions then they should inherit from the folder.

edit: ctrl+a selects all files in the folder then you can change who they are shared with all at once.