Whether you're leaving campus or reducing your My Drive storage, moving content to a Shared drive is the recommended option.  Content that's shared with a team should be stored in Shared drives rather than your individual Google Drive.  To learn more about creating Shared drives, visit the Google Workspace Learning Center.

  • The shared drive owns the files and folders
  • Members have access to them based on their permissions
  • If someone leaves UCSB or is removed as a member of the shared drive, their files remain in the shared drive and are still accessible to the existing members
  • You can share files and folders with a link or invite
  • Shared drives have a default quota size of 50GB.

Create a Shared Drive:

  1.  From your browser, go to drive.google.com
  2.  On the left, click Shared drives
  3.  At the top left, click + New
  4.  Enter a name for the shared drive and be department specific to avoid duplicate names
  5.  Click Create

Add Members to a Shared Drive:

  1.  Select the Shared Drive you want to move files to
  2.  Click the down-arrow to the top of the shared drive name and select Manage members
    1. If Manage members isn't available, you do not have permissions to add them
  3.  Add the members with their appropriate permission level
  • Manager: Manage members, upload, edit, move, or delete all files and folders
  • Content manager: Upload, edit, move, or delete all files and folders
  • Contributor: Edit all files, upload new files, but can’t move or delete files
  • Commenter: Only view and comment on all files
  • Viewer: Only view all files

To move My Drive content to a Shared drive:

  1.  Hover your cursor over the file or folder you want to move and right-click over it
  2.  Select Organize and then Move
    1. After highlighting the file or folder by hovering over it, you can click the Move button instead located in the menu items at the top (envelope icon with an right-arrow →)
  3.  Click the All Locations tab at the top
  4.  Click the arrow at the right of Shared drives to browse your Shared drives
  5.  Locate and select the Shared drive you want to move the content to and select Move
  6.  Google will scan the content to confirm there are no errors and a pop-up window will appear with the summary of actions
  7.  Click Move