Discovery & change tracking

Keeping a local view of a drive in sync — the two patterns Microsoft recommends for large tenants: delta (changes since a token) and search (find by keyword across everything). Both page automatically as you iterate.

Scenario	Example	Shows
Incremental sync	delta_sync.py	full delta, persist the returned token, replay it to fetch only changes
Keyword search at scale	search_across_drives.py	one search per drive, aggregated (cap drives with --max-drives)

Delta in one snippet

The delta link is opaque — persist it and replay it; never build it.

changes, delta_link = client.me.drive.root.delta().execute_query()
# next run:
changes, delta_link = client.me.drive.root.delta(delta_link).execute_query()

Delta is also the right recovery path after webhooks notifications were missed.

Requires Files.Read (delta) or Files.Read.All + Sites.Read.All (tenant search).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/driveitem-delta https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/driveitem-search