Google Workspace Shared Drives: Complete Setup, Permissions, and Admin Guide

Shared drives are one of the most important features in Google Workspace for keeping company data under company control. Unlike My Drive (where files belong to an individual and can disappear when they leave) files in a shared drive belong to the organization. They stay when people change roles or leave, which makes shared drives the right home for any team or project content.

This guide covers everything an IT admin needs: shared drives vs. My Drive, edition differences, creating and managing shared drives, access levels, per-drive and organization-wide settings, external sharing, migration from My Drive, governance, and troubleshooting.

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Shared Drives vs. My Drive

The business case is simple: anything that belongs to the organization (project documents, templates, runbooks, contracts, finance records) should live in a shared drive, not in someone’s My Drive.

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Shared Drives by Edition

If you’re on Business Starter, plan around the missing controls: keep sensitive data in drives with tightly managed membership.

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Creating Shared Drives

Google is clear that you create shared drives in Drive, not in the Admin console. The Admin console is where you manage them afterwards.

Admin-created drives (recommended for governance)

If you restrict creation to admins, or want to set up a structure for widely used drives before users start creating their own:

1. In Drive, open Shared drives in the left menu and click + New
2. Name it using your naming convention
3. Add members and groups with the right access levels
4. Manage it from Admin Console → Apps → Google Workspace → Drive and Docs → Manage shared drives

User-created drives

Users create shared drives the same way in Drive. They can do this unless an admin has turned it off for their OU.

Controlling who can create shared drives

Admin Console → Apps → Google Workspace → Drive and Docs → Sharing settings → Shared drive creation. The checkbox is Prevent users in [OU] from creating new shared drives. Turn creation off for most OUs and handle requests through IT (or allow it only for team leads) to prevent sprawl.

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Access Levels

Shared drive access applies to the whole drive and everything in it.

Manager: can add and remove members, change access levels, change drive settings, and delete the drive. Give this to two or three people per drive.

Content manager: can move, delete, and organize files and folders. Good for team leads who curate content.

Contributor: standard access for most team members: create, edit, and upload, but not delete other people’s files.

Best practice: add groups, not individuals, as members. Team membership then controls drive access automatically.

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Per-Drive Settings

Managers (and admins) can tighten settings on each shared drive. The options include whether:

• People outside the organization can be given access to files in the drive
• People who aren’t members of the shared drive can be given access to individual files
• Viewers and commenters can download, print, and copy files
• Content managers can share folders

For a sensitive drive (HR, legal, M&A), turn off external access and access for non-members, and stop viewers from downloading. On Business Starter, users can’t change these settings.

Default settings for new shared drives

Admins can set the defaults applied to newly created shared drives per OU from Drive and Docs → Sharing settings. This is the easiest way to make “no external access” the norm for new drives. (Not available on Business Starter.)

Organization-wide external sharing

Organization-level Drive sharing settings still apply on top of shared drive settings. If external sharing is off for an OU, members in that OU can’t share externally from a shared drive either. Many organizations allow external sharing only with allowlisted domains of trusted partners.

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Managing Shared Drives as an Admin

Admin Console → Apps → Google Workspace → Drive and Docs → Manage shared drives lists every shared drive in the organization. From here admins can:

• Add or remove members and change access levels
• Add a manager to a drive that has none (for example, after the last manager left)
• Change a drive’s settings
• Restore a deleted shared drive within 25 days of deletion
• Move a shared drive to a different OU, so the right OU-level policies apply

Shared drives belong to OUs. A shared drive’s organizational unit decides which Drive policies (and, on supported editions, data regions and other controls) apply to it. Use this to apply stricter rules to sensitive drives.

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Migrating Files from My Drive to Shared Drives

Small volumes: users move their own content

Users with Contributor, Content manager, or Manager access to a shared drive can move files they own or can edit from My Drive into it. Files owned by someone else need that owner (or an admin) to move them. In Drive, select the items → Organize → Move → choose the shared drive.

What changes when files move:

• The organization becomes the owner
• Members of the shared drive get access according to their role
• Links to the files keep working
• People who had access through individual sharing keep it unless you remove it

Large volumes: plan a project

For hundreds of users or terabytes of data, use a migration tool that can copy or move content into shared drives while preserving folder structure and permissions, and plan by team:

1. Agree a shared drive structure with each department
2. Create the drives and add groups as members
3. Move content team by team, starting with a pilot
4. Communicate where things moved and update bookmarks
5. Remove leftover sharing of moved files to people outside the team

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Governance Best Practices

Naming conventions: decide before sprawl starts. For example, [Department] - [Team or Project]: “HR - Recruiting”, “Finance - FY26 Budget”.

At least two managers per drive. Single-manager drives become orphaned when that person leaves.

Groups for membership. Use team groups (and, on supported editions, dynamic groups) so access follows team changes.

Quarterly membership reviews. Have drive managers confirm members and external access; remove people who’ve changed roles.

Lifecycle rules. Define what happens when a project ends: switch members to Viewer, move the drive to an “Archive” OU with stricter settings, and delete only according to your retention policy.

Mind the limits. A shared drive can hold up to 500,000 items, including files, folders, shortcuts, and items in trash. Very large departments should split content across several drives.

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Troubleshooting

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Conclusion

Shared drives are the foundation of team file governance in Google Workspace. They stop files disappearing when employees leave, give admins visibility and control, and make collaboration across teams cleaner than sharing from My Drive.

Move team content out of My Drive, restrict and name new drives, add groups rather than individuals, keep two managers per drive, and set sensible defaults for external access. Those steps alone will greatly improve your organization’s Drive governance.

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Official Google documentation:

• Shared drive limits in Google Drive
• Manage shared drives as an admin
• Allow users to create shared drives
• Set up shared drives for your organization

Related reading:

• Google Workspace Admin Security: 10-Point Hardening Guide: includes Drive sharing controls as part of a broader security framework.
• Google Workspace Business Plans Comparison: shared drive controls differ between Business Starter and higher plans.
• Google Workspace User Lifecycle: Onboarding and Offboarding: shared drives are essential to clean offboarding.