Shared Drives Best Practices

Teams use Google Shared drives to store, access, and work on files together. Follow these best practices when you create a Shared drive. To see how they differ from My Drive, read the Google Shared drives and My Drive Differences guide.

Plan Before You Create

Plan your shared drives before you create them. You can grant access to an entire shared drive, or just to specific files and folders. Create separate shared drives for different groups to keep permissions simple.

Shared drives limit membership to 600 people and 100 Google Groups, up to 50,000 total people. Check Google’s support pages to see other limits.

Note: Students cannot create shared drives. To request one, email the Help Desk at help@lafayette.edu or call (610) 330-5501. Include this information:

  • The reason for the shared drive request
  • The name of your faculty advisor for a research or club project

Establish Naming Conventions

Create standard naming rules for your team’s shared drives. Examples include:

  • ITS Projects
  • English External Review
  • HR 2025 Budget

Move Files from My Drive to a shared drive

Move group or department files to a shared drive instead of making copies. Moving files keeps the original link and preserves current user permissions. Copying files changes the links. This creates multiple file locations and confuses users.

Contact the Help Desk at help@lafayette.edu or (610) 330-5501 if you need to move a My Drive folder that contains files you do not own. ITS can grant special permission to let you move these folders.

Note: Shared drives hold a maximum of 500,000 items. This total includes files, folders, and shortcuts.

Assign Permissions as Needed

The Manager role grants the highest access to the shared drive. Limit this role to a few people. See shared drive roles for more information.

Hide Infrequently Used Shared Drives

You can hide shared drives you rarely use to clear your screen. Hiding a drive does not remove your access. It also does not change how other members see or use the drive.

How to hide a shared drive:

  1. Go to drive.google.com.
  2. Click “Shared drives” on the left.
  3. Right-click the drive you want to hide and click “Hide shared drive.”

How to unhide a shared drive:

  1. Go to drive.google.com.
  2. Click “Shared drives” on the left.
  3. Click “Hidden shared drives” in the top right.
  4. Right-click the drive you want to unhide and click “Unhide shared drive.”
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