Insights - Shared drives

3-minute read

This section lists all the shared drives you have in your organization, including drives with no shared files on them.

Note that information about shared drives in this section is drawn from your tenant every 4 hours, so drives created after the last data fetch will not be visible.

Using column sorting, you can quickly get an overview of the shared drives with the most sharing activity. And in the column Exception, you can also see the shared drives, where exceptions to the global cleanup settings for shared drives have been introduced.

Clicking the grey arrow icon on a shared drive will take you to the files and folders on the drive that are eligible for cleanup.

Unsharing permissions

This list is identical to the one you can pull up in the Files area when selecting a shared drive that you are responsible for. And just like in Files, you can easily unshare or extend the sharing of individual files/folders using the relevant buttons or icons.

Note that clicking a file's name will open a side panel that gives you an overview of all the users that it is shared with and their permission levels. This enables you to remove permission on selected accounts instead of unsharing the item entirely.

You can access the individual file directly by clicking the three dots and then Open in Google Drive.

Access inherited through shared folders

External users may have access to a file/folder on the shared drive because they have access to the folder the item is placed in. If this is the case, the permission will be marked with Inherited from <folder name>.

This means that File Governance is unable to unshare the permissions to the item with these users at this level. But if you click the folder name, you will be taken to the sharing details of the folder. Here, you can unshare the user's access to the folder - and with it, access to the item.

Note that inherited access may go several folders deep. If you want an overview of the files and subfolders the shared folder contains, you can find the folder in the list, click the three dots and select Go to folder.

Items shared entirely through external users' access to the folder it is placed in will be greyed out and marked Permissions inherited.

Access through shared drive membership

Some external users may have access to a file/folder because they are members of the shared drive. If a shared drive has members that are external, the drive will be marked with a red exclamation point icon.

Click the icon to see external members and their role on the drive.

If you want to revoke the users' access to the item, you need to go to Google Workspace and do something about their membership of the shared drive.

Note that items shared entirely through shared drive membership will not be listed in File Governance.

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