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In addition to your users' My Drives, Tricent for Google Workspace can also help clean up files on your organization's Shared Drives. This happens in the area Shared Drives under Admin.

You start the cleanup by toggling Automatic cleanup enabled. However, this is something we recommend you do at the very end once you have gone over all the settings below.

General cleanup policy for Shared Drives

The cleanup of your organization's Shared Drives happens in principle just like the cleanup of your users' My Drives.

The most significant difference is that the cleanup responsible is the Drive Manager(s), Content Manager(s), or both. When toggled, these individuals will see the files on the drives in their dashboard, 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.

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 simply and automatically unshare the files - just like with the users' My Drives.

You can also choose to leave out specific users - for instance, service accounts - from the Shared Drive cleanup process by clicking Exclude Accounts. This will open a window where you can add the user or users that you want to leave out.

On the right side of General Shared Drives automated cleanup policy you can define the settings for the automated cleanup of your Shared Drives. You may recognize the four settings from the Configure Cleanup area.

Cleanup frequency in days

This is the amount of days between our automated cleanup engine unsharing files on the Shared Drive. These are followed up by notification emails, letting the responsible know that a cleanup is coming and ways to safelist the files or unshare them straight away.

Maximum files to present to user for cleanup

How many files are presented in the emails, and also, how many files are being cleaned up by the engine at each interval? We recommend 8-14 files per cycle, so it is reasonably manageable for the responsible to keep on top of while still making progress in cleaning up the shared files. 

Maximum days that files can be safelisted

When the Shared Drive cleanup responsible decides to safelist files instead of unsharing them, you can limit how long they should be able to safelist. This depends on the kind of organization you are working in, but keep in mind the average duration of projects in the company when deciding how long safelisting should be.

Newly added files safe for (days)

This setting introduces a grace period for newly created files. During this time period, files on the Shared Drives won't be eligible for cleanup.

Override general policy on individual drives

In the lower half of the area, you can see the actual Shared Drives in your organization and locate a specific one by using the search field.

You can enable the automated cleanup for each drive by flipping the switch in the column Automated Cleanup.

If, however, you want other settings for an individual drive than the general ones, you can go ahead and click the cogwheel icon. This will open the override cleanup settings window, where you can define alternative settings.

Here you can even give cleanup responsibility to individual employees by using the field Users and unticking Drive Managers and Content Managers.

Ticking Enable policy override will substitute the global settings on this Shared Drive with the ones you have configured here.

The color of the cogwheel in the column Automated Cleanup indicates whether override settings have been set up and enabled. Gray means that no override settings have been set up, orange means that they have been set up but not enabled, and blue means that they have been set and enabled.

A red bell icon indicates that at least one external user is a member of that particular drive. Clicking the icon opens a window that lists those users. An orange bell indicates that no accounts are assigned to clean up on this shared drive, so no cleanup will take place

Incidentally, you can see all the Drive Managers of the drive in the column Drive Owner.

Note that for Tricent to operate on your Shared Drives, the Tricent Technical Account you created during your onboarding will be a Drive Manager on all your Shared Drives. This account will not be visible in this column, but you will see it if you inspect the drive in your Google Workspace.

Unsharing files on Shared Drives

If you click a file in the Shared Drive Actions list, a window will open listing all the externally shared files on the drive.

Ticking individual files and then the blue Unshare button in the lower right will remove external permissions and any external link-share permissions from the selected files.

There is also an Export feature that will create a downloadable CSV file listing each share on the drive's files.

Video walkthrough of the section