Crazy sharing issue with Google Drive ?????

[TwistedHelixis]

We are just starting to use Google Drive properly and I just created a folder with staff files in which I shared with all the teachers. This folder gets listed in the 'Shared with me tab'. We are also using File Stream but the 'Shared with me tab does not get listed in this so I asked the teachers to drag and drop the shared folder in to their 'My Drive' tab. A couple of teachers did not understand and started dragging individual files across, which obviously moved those files from a shared location to a none shared location, but those files then vanished for everyone.

 

So the files were not in the teachers drive that had moved them and not in anyone's folders that did have then originally.

 

I did manage to find the documents in the recent tab under my account but they were nowhere else to be found.

 

Yes the teachers did get a message to say they were moving a file and that it would lose permissions but surely it should not remove it from everywhere, never to be seen again. If we have thousands of files in Drive how would we even know some where missing.

 

Not sure I have explained the situation very well, sorry.

[ITBadger]

Have you considered using Team Drives to prevent this issue? That, at least keeps the files under the ownership of the organisation. It also seems as though there is a training need with your staff, as there was with mine when we started using Google Drive. They need to understand that Shared With Me isn't a very good location to 'store' files and aslo to understand the difference between copying a file and clicking 'add to my drive'. Sorry if i'm teaching you to suck eggs, but getting the basics right from the beginning will prevent a lot of confusion, and potentially lost files down the line.

[FN-GM]

Have you considered using Team Drives to prevent this issue? That, at least keeps the files under the ownership of the organisation. It also seems as though there is a training need with your staff, as there was with mine when we started using Google Drive. They need to understand that Shared With Me isn't a very good location to 'store' files and aslo to understand the difference between copying a file and clicking 'add to my drive'. Sorry if i'm teaching you to suck eggs, but getting the basics right from the beginning will prevent a lot of confusion, and potentially lost files down the line.

 

I completely agree with this statement. I would look at Team Drives.

[dhicks]

It also seems as though there is a training need with your staff

 

I agree that Team Drives are going to be the better solution for the above issue. However, if you do find yourself needing to share files / folders from a user's Drive and don't want to have to tell your users to go rummage in their "Shared With Me..." view, it turns out that you can move stuff between Shared With Me and a user's Drive via the command line using GAM (or, indeed, the Drive API, if you want).