My Drive vs shared drives

Files in My Drive belong to a person. Files in a shared drive belong to the team. Put business files where the business owns them.

Who owns the file?

Every file in Drive has an owner. In My Drive, the owner is you. If your account is suspended or deleted, your files go with it unless someone transfers them first. The team can be locked out of the price list because the person who made it left in March.

A shared drive is owned by the organization. Files inside it belong to the drive, not to whoever uploaded them. People come and go; the files stay.

	My Drive	Shared drive
Owner	One person	The organization
When that person leaves	Files are at risk unless transferred	Nothing changes
Who can see a new file	Only you, until you share it	Everyone who is a member of the drive
Sharing	File by file, folder by folder	Set once at the drive; per-file sharing still possible
Best for	Drafts, personal notes, your own copies	Anything the business depends on

The difference the week someone leaves.

Two cards: a Price list in Maria's My Drive, shared with the whole team but still hers, which goes with her when her account is suspended in March; and the same Price list in the Operations shared drive, owned by the organization, where nothing changes when she leaves; below, the bus question — A My Drive folder shared with the whole team is still one person's folder. A shared drive belongs to the organization.

The simple rule

Ask: “If I were hit by a bus tomorrow, would the business need this file?” If yes, it belongs in a shared drive. Contracts, price lists, schedules, templates, customer lists, brand assets, procedures: shared drive. Your scratch notes, a half-written idea, a certificate from this training: My Drive is fine.

Sharing a My Drive folder with the whole team feels like the same thing. It is not. It is still your folder, and it still leaves with you.

How shared drives are organised

Most small businesses need only a few shared drives, one per team or area: Operations, Finance, Sales and Marketing, HR (restricted). Each has members with a role (Manager, Content manager, Contributor, Commenter, Viewer). Managers add and remove people; everyone else works.

Do not create a shared drive per project; you will have forty by next year. Projects are folders inside the team’s drive.

Shared drive member roles, each adding to the one before.

Five rising steps: Viewer can read and download, Commenter can also comment, Contributor can also add and edit files, Content manager can also move, rename and delete, and Manager can also add and remove members — Managers add and remove people. Most members need Contributor and nothing more.

Moving files into a shared drive

You can move your own My Drive files into a shared drive, and ownership moves with them. Moving someone else’s file needs them to do it, or an administrator. Do it now for anything that matters, not during the week someone resigns.

Try it now

Open My Drive and look at the first ten files you own. For each, ask the bus question. Move anything the business needs into the right shared drive, and tell the team where it went.

Remember: My Drive is yours and leaves with you. If the business needs it, it lives in a shared drive.

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