Settings - Shared drives cleanup

5 minute read

The main setup of the cleanup cycle on your organization's shared drives is done under Settings.

The first time you access this area as a new customer the setting Enable cleanup on shared drives is disabled. This means that the cleanup cycle is not running - no files are being unshared, and no notification emails are going out.

Flipping Enable cleanup on shared drives will enable you to configure the four main settings and any advanced settings you may want to change.

Don't worry about setting off notification emails or file cleanup immediately after clicking Save cycle settings: The changes won't come into effect until the following night.

Cleanup cycle main settings

The four main settings are:

Understanding the timeline

Just below the four main settings, you find an overview of the active cleanup cycle (or cycles) and any new one waiting to become active.

If you change something in the main settings, you will see this new cycle as a green timeline labeled New cycle. You could see this as a draft. Once you click Save cycle settings, it will lie in wait - ready to become the active one.

The new cycle will become active once users finish the previous cycle and start entering the new one.

It is possible to temporarily have multiple active cycles when you introduce a new one, as any new employees joining your organization after the introduction of the first active cycle will likely be out of sync with their colleagues.

This means that some employees will join the new cycle while others are completing the first active one. Once everyone has left a cycle, it disappears from the timeline. 

Note that the timeline only shows your global cleanup cycles, not cleanup cycles that are running through exceptions.

Advanced settings

By clicking Advanced settings, you can access a handful of additional settings for the cleanup of the shared drives.

General Settings

In order for Tricent to act on your shared drives, the service account/admin role you created when you were onboarded needs to be a member of each drive.

Rather than you adding the service account to every shared drive, you can choose to toggle Assign membership. This will add the service account to your shared drives automatically.

Cleanup responsible

Here you can choose who will be responsible for cleaning up the shared drives. Is it the Drive manager(s), Content manager(s), or both? When toggled, these individuals will see the drives in their drive selector if they are cleanup enabled, and they will be included in the notification emails that they receive.

Note that you set who the Drive managers and Content managers are on the individual shared drive in your Google Workspace Admin area, not here in Tricent.

If there are multiple owners, they will share the responsibility, and all receive emails at the same time. If any one of them has an opinion on the share, they can go ahead and unshare or extend. Otherwise, Tricent will automatically unshare the files.

Use My Drive settings

By toggling this switch, you can choose to use the settings from My Drive cleanup on the below three settings.

Files selected for cleanup

Here you can choose which files you want to present to the users for cleanup - the oldest, the newest, the most shared, or the least shared.

Trust group shares from verified domains

If you use groups for internal purposes only, then you can choose to exclude them from the cleanup cycle here. You could, for instance, have project groups with external members inside, knowing that these individuals will have access to the needed information throughout the entire project.

Exclude weekdays

You can also remove individual weekdays from the cleanup cycle. Files will not be cleaned up, but we will still send notification emails to users on those days.

Exclude users from cleanup responsibility

At the bottom of Advanced settings you can add users that you want to exclude from shared drive cleanup responsibility entirely. This means that the users will never become cleanup responsible on a shared drive.

Remember to finish by clicking Save settings.

Exceptions

To the global shared drive settings, you can add exceptions that will override them on individual shared drives.

1. Start by clicking the blue button Add Exception.

2. Now select the shared drive to which you want to apply the exception settings.

3. Then toggle Cleanup.

4. Now you can add the exception settings:

5. Finally, you can also choose an alternative cleanup responsible. So if your global cleanup settings, for instance, have both Drive manager and Content manager as responsible, you can choose just to have the Drive manager clean up this shared drive. 

You can also add a specific user as cleanup responsible by using the dropdown Search specific user.

6. Save the exception by clicking Add Exception.

You have now added the exception to the list.

Use the trashcan and pencil icons to delete and edit the exception.

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