Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For many business owners, a messy Google Drive is a constant source of frustration, leading to lost files, confusion among team members, and significant security risks. This guide offers a simple, powerful solution: leveraging Google Shared Drives with a smart, group-based permissions system. This approach transforms your file management from chaotic to meticulously organized, ensuring that your valuable business information is always accessible, secure, and under your company’s ownership.
The core issue with relying on “My Drive” for sharing is that individual ownership of files can lead to critical data loss when employees or contractors leave and clear out their personal drives. Shared Drives resolve this by making the company the owner of all content, creating a robust, centralized repository akin to a traditional company server. This shift is foundational for any business aiming for efficient collaboration and data integrity.
Once your groups are established, you can create Shared Drives tailored to your business needs, such as a drive for each department or even for individual clients if you handle specific projects. When assigning permissions to these Shared Drives, roles like ‘Contributor’ are ideal for most team members, allowing them to add and edit files but preventing accidental deletion of company data. For highly sensitive information, advanced settings within Shared Drives can restrict downloading, copying, or printing, adding an extra layer of security.
The final piece of the puzzle is establishing and enforcing clear internal policies. Train your team that all shareable documents must reside in a Shared Drive, not in their personal “My Drive.” Regularly auditing document ownership helps reinforce this discipline, ensuring your business data is always protected and organized. By following these steps, you can achieve file organization that truly supports your business’s growth and operational efficiency.
To maximize the benefits of Shared Drives, the first crucial step is to implement group-based permissions. Instead of granting access to individual users, you create specific security groups (e.g., Executive, Management, Team, Contractors) and assign permissions to these groups. This method offers scalability and simplifies user management: when a new team member joins, you simply add them to the relevant group, and they instantly gain access to all necessary resources. Conversely, removing access when someone departs becomes a single, click-based action.
Watch: How to use Google Shared Drive | Complete Tutorial [2025]
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Full Video Transcription
How to use Google Shared Drive | Complete Tutorial [2025]
itGenius 🤓 Biz Tech Experts · 32K views
if you’ve ever been frustrated with your Google Drive being a complete mess and you try to share things with your team in your business or someone you’re working with and it’s just not working this tutorial is for you and there are simple steps you can take to get your Google Drive organized so you can find the information when you need it and never lose anything or get your wires crossed when you’re trying to work on documents to run your business Google Drive is a powerful tool for storing business information but it can quickly run out of control because there’s not really much of a focus on folders or organization it’s about creating documents easily and quickly online and sharing them which is all fine but the organization side of things for busy business owners can sometimes fall by the wayside. I’m going to share with you a simple system for keeping things organized and I promise you if you stick to the basic rules and protocols that I share with you after you’ve got the setup done correctly well you are going to be in a file organization bliss. You never need to lose something again and you can always find where things are and including sharing with your team your colleagues your consultants your contractors anyone else that you need to work with and always find the information when you need it. We’re going to start with Google Drive and then we’re going to get into Shared Drives which is the powerhouse of Google’s file sharing system so buckle up and let’s get started. Now Google Drive is Google’s cloud-based storage system. Not only does it let you create Google format documents on the web, docs, sheets, slides, forms, but you can also download files and synchronize them to your computer. If you’ve ever used Dropbox in the old days, Google Drive can work in the same way and you can put your Microsoft documents, you can put your PDFs, you can put your movie files, your MP3s, whatever you want into your Google Drive and they’ll synchronize between your computer and the web and down to any other computer that you want to access them from as well. You can access these files offline if you choose to download them offline and you can get access to them by mobile as well. One of the cool features which is not very well known about Google is you can even back up your computer to your Google Drive and so your my drive will have a copy of the files on your computer. That’s useful but that’s not the topic that we’re focusing on today. Today we’re talking about sharing. Now of course for many of us when we think about sharing we’re talking about Google’s online file formats that we can collaborate on in real time. But how do we manage the rest of the files in the Google world when we have a PDF or a video file that we want to share with a colleague or maybe even something that a customer has sent us in Microsoft format and we’ve got to deal with that? Well, that’s where sharing starts to come into the Google world. Now your my drive is a place that you can store files but it’s not the best place to share files. Think of your my drive as your my documents on your computer. Your documents folder is a place for your stuff but it’s not really a place to be sharing with others because your stuff can get mixed up with stuff that you want to share with others and we have the equivalent of that happening inside your my drive inside of Google. Now for many years the default of sharing files has been to create a shared folder inside of my drive. Now you can of course share a file on an individual basis by clicking the share button but many people will also create a shared folder within their my drive. Now this works but they have one fatal flaw and that is when you create a shared folder inside of my drive well you may be the owner of the folder but you’re not necessarily the owner of the files within that folder. What do I mean by that? Well, if I share that folder with someone who’s outside my business, the person who is placing files into that shared folder within my my drive is the owner of the files that they place into the folder. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? We own the folder but they own the files inside the folder and the reason for that is my drive counts towards your individual storage and if we shared a folder and allowed someone to put whatever they wanted into there, well it might start counting towards our storage. So Google have said right leave the owner as the person who counts towards the storage being consumed and that has a very unique problem for business owners. The problem is that that person outside your company whether they’re a consultant whether they’re an ex-partner whether they’re a virtual assistant who helped you out that one time if they are the owner of the file sitting inside your my drive, they have the ability to delete them. And usually what happens is two or three or five years down the line unbeknown to you that person is cleaning up their my drive because they’ve run out of space and they decide to delete old files and they haven’t worked with you for a couple of years so they decide to delete the stuff that they made or contributed towards for you and what happens it disappears from your my drive. So that kind of data loss happens unfortunately every week and customers call us all the time saying hey I’ve lost all of my files and there’s a simple way of avoiding that and that is Google Shared Drive. Now not to be confused with shared folders, Shared Drives are a corporate file storage solution and they’re designed for business use. Shared Drives appear below your my drive so it’s really obvious to know when you’re working with a Shared Drive and the Shared Drives allow you to set corporate level controls over a folder. Now once a Shared Drive has been configured if you place a file into a Shared Drive, well it becomes the property of the company no matter who is collaborating on that folder or the Shared Drive, the company will become the owner of the file once a file is placed into that drive. It means that you are safe from anyone deleting those files as long as you’ve set your permissions correctly. So think of Shared Drives like the company server you probably used to have if you’ve ever worked in corporate or if you used to have a physical server sitting in an office somewhere where you had your my documents is where you’d store your my stuff that’s your my drive and the Shared Drives is where you had a company Drive, sometimes it was an iDrive or a G drive or an S drive that’s what Shared Drives is that’s where you store all of the company stuff. Someone puts a file in there it becomes company stuff unlike your my drive. Shared Drives give you additional layers of security, additional permissions, and if someone leaves the company they don’t necessarily take the files with them unless they were to manually try and delete something. So Shared Drives protect you against all of the downsides of a shared folder inside your my drive. So before we go and set up our Shared Drives there’s one step that we need to do first and that is to switch to group-based permissions. Now this is my recommendation for any business, even if you’ve got only three or four employees and you’re on your scale journey, group-based permissions allow you to set your permissions once and have them scale nicely as your business grows. It means that you keep your security in check and no one who should accidentally get access to the wrong folder does. It means that you protect your documents as your business grows and if you need to remove a contractor or a person who’s shared access to different resources in different areas you can do it with one click. We set up groups by going to our admin panel, going to directory and then the group service and you want to create your first group. Now there’s two ways of managing groups if you’re a large organization you’ve got more than 20 employees you might create a group for each area of the business one for executive one for marketing one for sales one for delivery one for finance but if you’re a smaller team and I mean less than 20 employees you might make sense to just go with what I call my simple permissions system and that is you really only need four groups for a business to operate. One is for executive or owners or shareholders that’s kind of like the people that own the business and the stuff that you don’t want to share with anybody else because it’s your corporate plans or something important like your tax returns that no one else needs to see inside the business. Now secondly you may choose to have another group for either management for middle managers or for your accounts department, the kind of things that you want to share with someone who’s involved in the financial operations but not necessarily every single person in the business. Here’s where you may put things like payroll information you might choose to share it with your bookkeeper but only certain people need to have access to that group. Number three is your team, so that’s everyone in the whole company. This is the kind of group where you want to share one resource with everyone and you want everyone to be able to see it. That’s going to be shared to the team group. Number four is contractors and that’s for people that are outside your business. You may choose to give only read only permission to them or maybe you want to give them access to something where they can place a file in but not delete any files. That’s your contractor’s group. Once you set up each one of these groups and my recommendation is that you choose the restricted Security Group type inside of Google Workspace group service, you first choose Security Group and then on the next page choose restricted and I also like to tick the box that says let everyone in the company see who’s in this group. That allows you to share calendar invites to that group and for everyone to see who’s been invited to the calendar but calendar video is a video for another day. Let’s get to setting up our Shared Drives. Now my recommendation is to create a Shared Drive just for those four groups of staff in the business. If you’re a larger organization and you want to have a dedicated Shared Drive just for your training material or a dedicated drive just for your sales team, go ahead, there’s no real limit on creating Shared Drives. If you’re a small or medium-sized business and you can create thousands of them if you really want to. We see some customers even create a Shared Drive for each one of their clients if you’re a professional services business and you happen to do a lot of work with different clients. It makes more sense to have granular permissions with lots of Shared Drive setup even if you only have a few groups because Shared Drives allow you to have a special little container for a group of files which can keep your permissions nice and tidy and keep the wrong people from seeing the wrong files. As you add each shared group you’ll have the opportunity to add members to that group and here’s where I don’t recommend you add individual users to these groups, you are going to be adding your groups that you’ve just created so that each permission can be set per group. Remember the purpose of doing this is that when we onboard or we offboard staff it makes things simpler. All we need to do is add a person to the business and add them to the right group and theoretically they’ll get access to all the resources that they need right across their business including to the right Shared Drives. Once someone’s added to a Shared Drive via a permissions group, well it’ll automatically show up in their list of Shared Drives and if you have for example a contractor’s group set up with external users allowed to access that group or you can even add a Gmail address of someone who’s outside your organization to that group and they’ll get access to the Shared Drive. Now when we’re choosing permissions for the Shared Drives we’ve got a few different options of levels of permissions that we can create for our team members. Manager gives full permission over the whole team drive and I typically reserve this for the executive group only because you don’t want anyone else changing the settings here. Content manager is one that I would typically give to a middle manager or a team leader because they can edit files and also delete business content as well. Be careful with who you give the ability to delete content inside your business because once something’s gone from the rubbish bin after 30 days it is gone for good. Now there are third party backup tools available, Google Vault is one option for securing your data but I’d recommend something that actually takes your data outside of the Google ecosystem completely and we’ve got other videos on how to look at backing up strategies for your Workspace account. For most of your staff I would recommend the contributor role and this would probably be going to your team group that you’ve created. The contributor role is the one that allows people to put files into a Shared Drive but not delete files. The team can work on the files that they’ve created, they can edit other files that are in the team drive but they’re not allowed to delete company data and this rule I absolutely love because I’m a packrat and I don’t want anything to accidentally go missing. From time to time sometimes staff can either maliciously which is rare or what’s more common is go into the Google Drive and start deleting things usually because they have the misguided idea that they need to go and clean up big files to keep things tidy. Now nowadays we have so much storage available in our Google Workspace accounts on all of the plans for most businesses you’re never going to get close to filling it up. Now granted if you’re in the world of video editing or you’re working with some kind of heavy file sizes, okay sure maybe you’ll fill up your Google Drive but for 90% of our customers they’re nowhere near the storage limits that Google have provided on their plans and sometimes it’s just a matter of adding one or two more users to your account if you find that you’ve run out of storage. But nevertheless people still want to delete from their drive to keep it tidy from time to time and so we want to protect against that wherever possible. Commenter and viewer permissions are pretty straightforward, these are the ones where you may have a training drive that you want to share with your contractors but you don’t necessarily want them editing any of the files that are in there using the viewer or the commenter permission is a great solution for that. Now one little trick that I like to do is after the executive group has been added, I actually go back into the permissions and I remove myself as an individual. What this does is gives me a clean look at all of my Shared Drives and I can just with a glance double check and make sure that I haven’t accidentally added an individual user in my business to my Shared Drives. When I scroll through my Shared Drives and I see only groups have been added to the drives, I know that I’ve set up my permissions correctly. The reason for this is I don’t want any of my permissions to be beholden to a single user. I want them to be group-based which means that they’re scalable and my team are well protected. There’s also some Advanced features you can configure for each one of your Shared Drives. Right click on a Shared Drive and go to Shared Drive settings and you’ll see some extra options which you may not have seen in Google Drive shared folders that exist within your my drive. We’ve got the ability to restrict files to never be able to be shared outside of that particular Shared Drive. Now while the Shared Drive dictates settings and who gets default access to the whole Shared Drive, you can still change the settings on an individual file basis and potentially share them outside of the drive. These options here allow you to restrict that drive sharing just to people inside your organization or just to people inside that specific Drive permissions and I really like that because for something that is highly sensitive like financial or company information you may want to restrict them literally just to the people that are in that drive so no one can share anything outside from under you. Another cool feature that I really love is the ability to restrict downloading copying or printing files and that’s definitely one that you want to switch on to your training manuals or SOPs or anything that you’ve shared with someone outside the business. That means that sure if someone wants to screenshot every page of a 50-page document they could steal your company information but it’s unlikely to happen because it just makes it a little bit less convenient for someone to steal your business data or even to accidentally download something that you don’t want to have downloaded onto their home computer if they’re sharing it with other people in the lounge room. Now working with Shared Drives is pretty straightforward. If I’ve got a document open and I’ve created it, it’s going to default land in my my drive. I can right click and use the move option to move that into my Shared Drives or when I create the document I can use the folder icon to move it straight in after I’ve created the document. I do this as a rule immediately after I’ve created a document and I try as much as I can to train my team to do the same thing. We have an internal rule inside our company and that is if you want to share a document with anybody you must move it into a Shared Drive. Our team are not allowed to use the blue sharing button and share files manually, they must put files into a team drive because we want to build the discipline for our team to properly our files and put them into the right place. So I recommend you put that in place yourself. Now the thing with IT policies is my philosophy is simple rules, strong enforcement. Now the simple rule is when we share a file we put it in a Shared Drive. Strong enforcement means if someone sends me a file and I can see that they’re the owner of a file not the Shared Drive is the owner of the file, well I send the file back to them and I say hey please put this in the Shared Drive before I’m going to do my work on the file. That simple rule strong enforcement works well across our business and even though it does take some time for the team to get used to it they will eventually follow suit. Now unfortunately there’s no way to restrict the ability to create a file or folder in your my drive and force everyone to use Shared Drives for everything. I wish there was and if Google do change their policies and allow us to do that I’ll be sure to update this in a future video. You may be wondering once a file is in a Shared Drive what can I do with it? Well, if I have permission to, of course, I can delete it, I can change it, I can even move it back out of a Shared Drive if I have to. For most of your team though their permissions are going to be edit only so they’ll be able to access the file, they’ll be able to change the file but they won’t be able to delete or move that file out of its position. The other thing is once I share a Shared Drive with someone outside my business even if they’re using a Gmail account, the moment a file goes into that Shared Drive it becomes the ownership of the company. So someone can’t take it back out again by accident or on purpose. If I want to share a file from within my Shared Drive to someone outside the company as long as I haven’t restricted that in the Shared Drive settings, I can still use the sharing button and share that file outside or share it to another team member who needs comment access or who needs edit access on that file. That’s totally fine and I’m okay with that happening for non-critical files and non-critical areas of the business but my approach is as much as possible to keep your group permissions tidy in your Shared Drives and keep your team tidy and how they managing their own files by placing them into shared folders first. Let’s do a quick summary to make sure you’re successful with your Google Drive setup. First of all, we want to use our groups and make sure that we set them up first. Secondly we’re adding them to our Shared Drives and thirdly we’re training our team to use Shared Drives for everything. Now from time to time you want to do audits and just do a little spot check on any documents you come across in the business. Click the share button to see who the owner is, if the owner is an individual user it means they haven’t put it in a Shared Drive. So you want to make sure your team are doing that and remember to keep things as simple as possible. I see many small business owners who’ve only got a handful of staff creating a Shared Drive for every different area of the business or creating a million different security groups, you just don’t need it until you’re at 10, 15, 20 employees and above. Keep your group simple, keep the security simple otherwise you can get caught up in the overhead of IT management and you miss out on what you should be doing which is organizing, growing, and scaling your business. If you found this tutorial helpful, give us a thumbs up, drop a subscribe and we’ve got more free training available on our website just like this. If you’d like to do a free audit of your Google Workspace account or maybe you’ve got Legacy data sitting in SharePoint or one drive or even Dropbox that you want to migrate over and into Google Drive, well we have migration services available for small businesses as well as all of our consulting around Google Workspace and other small business tools. Click the link below for a free consultation where you can get an audit of your Google Workspace account or your full tech stack and our team are looking forward to helping you out there.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For many business owners, a messy Google Drive is a constant source of frustration, leading to lost files, confusion among team members, and significant security risks. This guide offers a simple, powerful solution: leveraging Google Shared Drives with a smart, group-based permissions system. This approach transforms your file management from chaotic to meticulously organized, ensuring that your valuable business information is always accessible, secure, and under your company’s ownership.
The core issue with relying on “My Drive” for sharing is that individual ownership of files can lead to critical data loss when employees or contractors leave and clear out their personal drives. Shared Drives resolve this by making the company the owner of all content, creating a robust, centralized repository akin to a traditional company server. This shift is foundational for any business aiming for efficient collaboration and data integrity.
Once your groups are established, you can create Shared Drives tailored to your business needs, such as a drive for each department or even for individual clients if you handle specific projects. When assigning permissions to these Shared Drives, roles like ‘Contributor’ are ideal for most team members, allowing them to add and edit files but preventing accidental deletion of company data. For highly sensitive information, advanced settings within Shared Drives can restrict downloading, copying, or printing, adding an extra layer of security.
The final piece of the puzzle is establishing and enforcing clear internal policies. Train your team that all shareable documents must reside in a Shared Drive, not in their personal “My Drive.” Regularly auditing document ownership helps reinforce this discipline, ensuring your business data is always protected and organized. By following these steps, you can achieve file organization that truly supports your business’s growth and operational efficiency.
To maximize the benefits of Shared Drives, the first crucial step is to implement group-based permissions. Instead of granting access to individual users, you create specific security groups (e.g., Executive, Management, Team, Contractors) and assign permissions to these groups. This method offers scalability and simplifies user management: when a new team member joins, you simply add them to the relevant group, and they instantly gain access to all necessary resources. Conversely, removing access when someone departs becomes a single, click-based action.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The key steps include:
1. Implement Group-Based Permissions
Create security groups for different roles within your business (e.g., executive, management/accounts, team, contractors) to simplify access control and ensure scalability as your business grows.
2. Utilize Google Shared Drives
Transition from using “My Drive” for shared company files to Shared Drives, which are designed for corporate storage and make the company the owner of all files within them, preventing data loss.
3. Establish Clear File Management Protocols
Train your team to consistently place all shareable documents into Shared Drives and enforce this policy to maintain organization and security.
4. Regularly Audit Permissions and Drive Usage
Periodically check document ownership and Shared Drive permissions to ensure adherence to policies and prevent unauthorized access or accidental deletion.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For many business owners, a messy Google Drive is a constant source of frustration, leading to lost files, confusion among team members, and significant security risks. This guide offers a simple, powerful solution: leveraging Google Shared Drives with a smart, group-based permissions system. This approach transforms your file management from chaotic to meticulously organized, ensuring that your valuable business information is always accessible, secure, and under your company’s ownership.
The core issue with relying on “My Drive” for sharing is that individual ownership of files can lead to critical data loss when employees or contractors leave and clear out their personal drives. Shared Drives resolve this by making the company the owner of all content, creating a robust, centralized repository akin to a traditional company server. This shift is foundational for any business aiming for efficient collaboration and data integrity.
Once your groups are established, you can create Shared Drives tailored to your business needs, such as a drive for each department or even for individual clients if you handle specific projects. When assigning permissions to these Shared Drives, roles like ‘Contributor’ are ideal for most team members, allowing them to add and edit files but preventing accidental deletion of company data. For highly sensitive information, advanced settings within Shared Drives can restrict downloading, copying, or printing, adding an extra layer of security.
The final piece of the puzzle is establishing and enforcing clear internal policies. Train your team that all shareable documents must reside in a Shared Drive, not in their personal “My Drive.” Regularly auditing document ownership helps reinforce this discipline, ensuring your business data is always protected and organized. By following these steps, you can achieve file organization that truly supports your business’s growth and operational efficiency.
To maximize the benefits of Shared Drives, the first crucial step is to implement group-based permissions. Instead of granting access to individual users, you create specific security groups (e.g., Executive, Management, Team, Contractors) and assign permissions to these groups. This method offers scalability and simplifies user management: when a new team member joins, you simply add them to the relevant group, and they instantly gain access to all necessary resources. Conversely, removing access when someone departs becomes a single, click-based action.
