Google Drive for Business

If it is in their My Drive, they do — not the company. The account is licensed by the business, but the file sits in an individual's space, and when that account is deleted the file goes with it unless ownership was transferred first. If it is in a Shared Drive, the organisation owns it and membership can change without the files moving. This is the single most consequential decision in how you set Drive up, and it is far cheaper to get right at the start than to unpick once several years of work has accumulated in the wrong place.

It is pooled across the organisation rather than allocated per person, and it counts Drive, Gmail and Google Photos together. Each licence contributes its storage allowance to that shared pool, which means an individual can use more than their own licence nominally includes, and equally that a few heavy users draw on everyone else's headroom. The practical consequence is that the figure in the price list is a contribution rather than a personal allowance, and the right question is what the whole organisation stores rather than what any one person does. Checked against Google's admin documentation in September 2026.

Less catastrophically than most people expect, and in an order that surprises them. Google states that when an organisation exceeds its pooled limit, users can still sign in, send and receive email, and view and download files. What stops — after the limit is exceeded by 25% or for fourteen days — is adding new files to Drive, creating new collaborative documents, recording meetings, and allowing others to edit. Backing up to Google Photos stops immediately. So the business does not go dark; it quietly loses the ability to create, which is its own kind of problem because nobody notices until somebody tries.

Almost everything the business would miss, yes. The useful line is whether anybody other than the author would ever need it: work in progress, personal notes and drafts are perfectly reasonable in My Drive, while anything a colleague might have to find belongs somewhere the company owns. Getting the structure right — which drives exist, who is in them, and what each member can do — is a design exercise worth doing deliberately rather than by accumulation, and it is much harder to change once data is sitting in it. The full access-level matrix and the structural decisions are set out on the shared drives page.

Through the admin console rather than by asking people, because people genuinely do not remember. It is worth doing as a standing exercise rather than a one-off: what is shared with anyone who has the link, who outside the domain currently has access, and which of those relationships ended some time ago. Nothing about this is dramatic — it is almost never misconduct, just a link created for a good reason in 2023 that nobody had any cause to revisit.

No, and treating it as one is a common and expensive misunderstanding. It synchronises: a file deleted or overwritten on a laptop is deleted or overwritten in Drive, quickly and accurately. What protects you is the recovery window, which is finite and shorter than most people assume, and a deliberate decision about retention. We have set out what can actually be recovered and for how long on the backup and recovery page.

Streaming for almost everyone. Files appear in a drive on the machine but are fetched as needed, so nothing large sits on the laptop — which means a lost or stolen machine is an inconvenience rather than a data loss. Mirroring keeps a genuine local copy and is worth granting to specific people with a specific reason, such as sustained work somewhere with no usable connection. As a default for the whole company it puts a full copy of your files on every laptop you own, which is rarely what anybody intended.