While My Drive in Google Drive works extremely well for individuals who would like to store content online, and share that content with others, it offers only limited functionality for groups and teams.
Request a Shared Drive
Google Shared Drives (formerly known as Team Drives) are shared spaces where groups of people can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device. As with Drive, you can access files in Shared Drives from your computer using any web browser or you can install the mobile application to access your files from your Android or iOS mobile device. While the files in Google My Drive are owned by the drive owner, files stored in a Shared Drive belong to the team instead of an individual.
Shared Drive is ideal for groups of colleagues who often collaborate on documents together, such as workgroups, committees, or project teams. All team members can share in the responsibility of organizing and maintaining the files. Team members can be added or removed from the Shared Drive at any time. When a team member is removed from the group, all of the files remain in the Shared Drive so that the team can continue to share information and complete the necessary work. (Thanks to Stanford University for some of this content.)
Some of the distinct advantages of Shared Drives include:
- Files remain after an employee leaves
- Files are easier to find by looking in Shared Drives rather than My Drive or Shared with me
How to request creation of a Shared Drive
You can request the creation of a Google Shared Drive through the form located in MyBucknell>Forms and Policies>Library & IT>Technology Forms.
Direct link to the Request a Shared Drive Form
NOTE: Library & IT is in the process of creating Shared Drives for each division and department that currently has a folder in \\netspace\departments. A Shared Drive for each division and department should be completed by the end of September 2020. If your content should be accessible by everyone in your department, you can store it in this Shared Drive.
Questions about using Google Shared Drives? See Google's pages below:
Working with members
Add files and folders
Share and collaborate
Questions about Shared Drives limits?
See Google's page for details on the maximum number of items, maximum uploads per day, folder hierarchy limits, and Shared Drive membership limits
Migrating files and folders from My Drive to a Shared Drive
- You cannot move a folder directly, so you'll want to create a folder in the new Shared Drive and move single or multiple files into that folder. Be sure to grant permission again if necessary.
- Ownership of your files that you move to a Shared Drive now changes to the team.
- If you had previously granted permission to a file to an individual who does not have permission to the new Shared Drive, that person will retain permission to access that particular file (unless you specifically change or revoke that permission).
One of the best ways to move a large folder from your own Google Drive to a Shared Drive is to download/upload it. To do this:
- In the Drive web interface, locate the original folder, right click and select "Download."
- This will download a zip file of the folder to your local computer.
- Find the downloaded zip file and extract it.
- In the Drive web interface, go to the Shared Drive, and select New-->Folder upload
- Locate the extracted folder on your computer and upload it.
Once you have verified that everything looks good in the Shared Drive, you will need to go back and delete the original folder to avoid confusion and unnecessary storage use.
This works best when the files are owned by different people. You can only move files you own, but you will be able to download everything in the folder regardless of who owns the files, as long as you have at least read access. Also, when you delete the original folder, it will only actually delete files you own. Files owned by others will still be available in that person's "My Drive."