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Google Docs or Google Drive error with Too Many Requests, Access Denied, or Can’t download file

Too Many Requests Error For Input Url

Sometime if you use Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Dropbox or similar free cloud storage services to store your input files, you may get Too Many Requests, Access Denied or Can't download file errors after previously successful calls. Cloud services are throttling requests to prevent frequent access to their files by using this type of protection. Paid plans like Google Workspace provide better support for frequent access but still throttling all incoming requests too.

To solve this issue, PDF.co can use its built-in secure input url cache. Just add cache: prefix to your input url to enable caching.

For example: cache:[https://example.com/file.pdf](https://example.com/file.pdf)

This will tell PDF.co to cache file from the url for 1 hour. Instead of re-requesting your url every time, it will use its cached version. This will prevent from getting Too Many Requests error.

As an alternative, you can store your input files in our built-in PDF.co file storage which was specifically designed for providing alternative and more reliable way to store files for re-use in PDF.co specifically. It is available at https://app.pdf.co/files. You can upload file and copy special link to it (so called token), that looks like filetoken://12345… This type of link can be used from PDF.co platform only.

To learn more about PDF.co built-in file storage, please visit this page https://pdf.co/how-to-use-file-storage-on-pdfco

Applies to the following errors:

  • error 403
  • can't download file
  • too many requests
  • access denied