HubSpot’s terms of conditions specify that it does not support storage of sensitive data. This includes files stored in the HubSpot file manager tool. Personally identifiable information (PII) which includes personal documents such as passport, government identifications etc… cannot be stored in HubSpot.

Still, as business professionals, we require collecting such important documents and store them in a cloud storage such as Google Drive or SharePoint. Here’s where CloudFiles can help your business. Through the CloudFiles app you can collect this information through HubSpot and send it your backend storage which is compliant with all the laws.

CloudFiles is a GDPR-compliant and deeply integrated tool for HubSpot. It provides a feature called file requests which can be used with HubSpot workflows to collect & store sensitive files. These files can be then sent to folders in SharePoint, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox or even AWS S3 to be stored in a compliant way.

Thus, your business overcome HubSpot file manager limitations to store PII and PHI by using CloudFiles as a layer to collect and transfer the files from HubSpot to an external cloud storage.

Using the various CloudFiles workflow actions, we have created a process such that whenever a deal is created, a link would appear on the left side of the deal record. This link can be sent to customers manually or automatically. When the customer opens it, they would be able to upload files that will go into a folder on Google Drive. We would be able to see the uploaded files in Google Drive as well as from the deal record in HubSpot.

In the GIF below, we see this in action. The GIF is divided into 6 parts -

It’s important to note that the same is possible with SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox and AWS S3. Moreover, the same process can run with contacts, companies & tickets as well in HubSpot.

Read on to understand how to install the app and setup the workflow to achieve the same result.

Before we delve into the tutorial, you need to install CloudFiles into a HubSpot account. You can install the app from the HubSpot marketplace using the steps below. These are also detailed here in the installation guide -

Now that you have the app installed, you can connect an automation user for your workflow executions.

In addition to installing CloudFiles in HubSpot, you also need to set an automation user for the workflow to work. This is the integration user that will be used by the workflow actions to pass files into the cloud storage.

To connect an automation user, simply head over to app.cloudfiles.io > Settings > Integrations > Google Drive and login through your google account. What is an 'Automation User' and how does it work? this article explains everything you need to know about the automation user, including what it is, why it's useful, and how it operates.

To summarize the process, we will create a deal workflow using HubSpot. This workflow will contain various CloudFiles related actions. It will first create a dataroom and add a file request block to it. It will then configure the file request block to store the documents in a specific folder in Google Drive. Finally it will create a sharing link for the dataroom and paste it in one of the deal properties.

The workflow consists of the following 6 elements -

Here’s how our final workflow looks like. We detail these elements in the sections below.



We would like to have a sharing link ready on our HubSpot property whenever a new deal is created. For this reason, we choose a simple Deal Create Date is Known trigger. The trigger is shown below.

CloudFiles datarooms are very much like file portals. They can be used to share multiple files and folders. They can also be used to request files from customers. We will discuss this file request feature later. In this section we detail the “Create Dataroom” workflow action which can auto-create datarooms.

The Create Dataroom action has 3 parameters that have been detailed in Create Dataroom Action article. Here is a summary -

Here’s how our final workflow action looks.

In order to access the uploaded files from the contact record itself, it is important to associate this dataroom to the contact. This way we can see it in the contact sidebar. CloudFiles provides an easy to use “Create Attachment” action that can create this association automatically with the previously created dataroom.

The “Create Attachment” action will need the following properties -

You can learn more about this action in this help article. Here’s how our final action looks like.

The Add to Dataroom action is where we add a file request block to our newly created dataroom and set the destination parameters such that the uploaded files go into a Google Drive Folder. There are a bunch of parameters available in this action. You can see all the details about this action in this help article.

For our use-case, we will use the following parameters of the actions -

Here’s how our final action looks -



In order to share with customer, we need to create a personalized sharing link of the dataroom. Since we have already created a record attachment for the dataroom in one of the earlier steps, we will simply use the share attachment action to create a sharing link. We will later copy this link into a deal property.

This action only needs one parameter which is the ID of the attachment to share. We can grab this ID from our previous Create Attachment action. This is shown in the graphic below. You can check this help article to learn more about the Share Attachment action.

Finally we will use the Copy Property Value Action provided by HubSpot to copy the sharing link into one of the properties. For this tutorial, we created a contact property called ‘HubSpot Demo - Dataroom URL’ that we are using to copy the files into.

The sharing link can be grabbed from the return values of the Share Attachment that we used above. This is shown in the graphic below.

CloudFiles provides a few other workflow actions as well which can be used creatively to create even more complex process automations. We have a detailed a few actions below which, in combination with the above tutorial, can enable some complex use-cases. You can also read about all the CloudFiles’ workflow actions here.



In case you see some issues with the final execution, you can investigate the workflow execution error logs. You can also send us these logs and we can inform you of the issue or resolution quickly. Ping a screenshot of error logs as covered below on chat (bottom right) or on [email protected]

To get the execution error logs in HubSpot workflows, go to the workflow edit screen. On top right click on Enroll > View Enrollments. A sidebar opens up on the right with all your record executions. Hover over the problematic one and click on Enrollment details. In the details you will see success / error against each of the action execution for this workflow run. You can expand and check the error logs here.



The most common issues include -

This particular use-case is possible on all CloudFiles plans and works with any HubSpot licenses provided you have workflow access available. However, there are a few limits you need to be aware of. 

The use-case would require 1 dataroom per client and consumes multiple workflow actions, thus the limits on datarooms and workflow actions on each plan become important. Here's relevant pricing & limits info about these -  

Note that we offer progressive pricing, so if purchasing more seats, the per user per month costs reduces.

In this tutorial, we created workflow with actions from CloudFiles to create an automation that lets us request files from our customers through HubSpot deal objects and transfers them to Google Drive. It can be extended to other cloud storages and other HubSpot records as well.

We also saw a few other actions that make even more complex use-cases possible.

CloudFiles is a document automation and sharing platform that integrates very deeply with HubSpot. It is useful for any sales, marketing or service team who have file management and sharing requirements and are considering or already using HubSpot. To learn more about the app, visit their Hubspot integration page.