Google Workspace Shared Drives

Ownership. A file in My Drive belongs to the individual whose account it sits in, and leaves with them when that account is closed unless somebody transferred it first. A file in a shared drive belongs to the organisation: members come and go, and the files stay exactly where they are. That is the whole argument, and it is why anything the business would miss belongs in a shared drive rather than in somebody's personal space.

Contributor, in most organisations. According to Google's published matrix a Contributor can view, comment, edit, create and add files, add people to specific files, and restore from the trash within 30 days — but cannot move files around the drive and cannot put them in the trash. That is the right amount of power for somebody doing the work, and markedly less than Manager, which people hand out by reflex because it sounds like the one that lets you get things done.

Managers and Content managers can move files and folders to the trash. Only a Manager can permanently delete items from the trash, and only a Manager can move files out to a different shared drive. Contributors can restore from the trash but cannot put anything there in the first place. This is the single most useful thing to understand before assigning roles, because it determines how much damage an ordinary mistake can do — and most accidental data loss is an ordinary mistake by somebody with more access than their job needed.

Enough that membership genuinely differs between them, and no more. The test is simple: if two proposed drives would have the same members, they should be folders in one drive. If a single drive would force you to manage permissions folder by folder, it should be more than one. Most small businesses land somewhere between five and fifteen, organised around functions that outlive individuals — finance, sales, operations, HR — rather than around people or around projects that will end.

Through groups, almost always. Adding the accounts@ group rather than five named people means a joiner or a leaver is one change in one place, instead of a search across every drive in the organisation hoping you have found them all. It is a ten-minute decision at setup that removes a recurring risk, and the risk it removes — somebody retaining access after they leave — is the one that actually matters.

A few, and two are widely misquoted. Google states a maximum of 500,000 items per shared drive, counting files, folders, shortcuts and anything in the trash — not the 400,000 figure repeated in a lot of third-party write-ups. Folders can nest up to 100 levels, not the 20 some sources claim. Membership is capped at 600 groups and individuals combined, of which at most 100 can be groups, with 50,000 total individuals including those reached via groups. There is also a 750 GB per user per day upload and copy limit, which is worth planning a bulk migration around rather than meeting halfway through one. Checked against Google's published limits in September 2026.

Only up to a point, and it is worth understanding the limitation before you design around it. Access is granted at the level of the drive, and while individual files can have people added or removed, the shared drive is the unit that membership is really built on. If a folder genuinely needs a different audience from the rest of the drive, that is a strong signal it should be a separate shared drive. Fighting this with folder-level exceptions produces exactly the permissions tangle that shared drives were introduced to replace.

Whatever you decided in advance, which is usually nothing — which is why organisations end up with sixty drives and no idea which are live. The workable habit is to decide the ending when you create it: either the drive is permanent because it maps to a function, or it is temporary and somebody is named as responsible for archiving it. A drive nobody can confidently delete is not a filing system, it is a sediment layer.