Ramscaping Your Google Account Week 7 – Requesting a Shared Drive
Welcome to Week 7 of our Ramscaping challenge! This week we dive into Shared Drives, which are shared spaces that allow a team, project, department, etc. to store collaborative files.
⏪ If you missed last week, click here to see last week’s post.
🎉 Congratulations to Scottie W., our Week 6 Ramscaping winner!
🗓️ Weekly Goal: Determine if you own any materials in Google Drive that belong to a team, project, committee, etc.
🔥 Stretch Goal: Request a shared drive if needed and move those files to your new Shared Drive.
Benefits of a Shared Drive
Shared Drives provide several benefits:
- Files stored in a Shared Drive are owned by the group, so they aren’t at risk of deletion if one member leaves.
- Files in Shared Drives are kept separately from your own and make it easier to stay organized.
- You can star files in Shared Drives or add them as shortcuts for quick access.
- You can share specific files with people who aren’t members of the Shared Drive without giving access to everything.
Search for files to move
To determine if we need a Shared Drive, the easiest way is to search for files that are shared to a majority of the same individuals in your group (at least three or more people in average sized groups.) Fortunately, Google Drive search operators have just the right tools for the job.
In Google Drive, click on the search bar, then enter (or copy and paste) the following:
- to:team-member1@vcu.edu to:team-member2@vcu.edu to:team-member3@vcu.edu owner:me
Replace the “team-member1-3@vcu.edu” with the email addresses of your team members. You can add more email addresses to narrow down the results or reduce to broaden the results. Try different combinations as some items may only be shared between certain people, such as items only being shared between team members who’ve been part of the team for longer than others.
Decide your threshold
Once you’ve found items that can be moved, determine what your threshold is for requesting a Shared Drive. Keep in mind that even if only a small amount of files were found, starting early with a Shared Drive will be easier to maintain than identifying and moving a large amount of items later on.
When you’re ready to request a Shared Drive, visit our page for steps. Once your Shared Drive is ready, you can move your items.
Next week is our final week! We’ll be cleaning up our existing Shared Drives.This was posted as part of our “Ramscaping your Google Account” summer challenge.
Categories Ramscaping Your Google Account, Storage Cleanup