Moving shared drives to Google drive

[tj2419]

Has anyone gone down the line of migrating shared drives to the cloud? Specifically g suite. I get that I can use something like r clone to upload data but my question is more around the best method to share it back out?

 

E.g. did you upload it all to a team drive called "shared drive" or something or did you split it into department shared drives etc? Struggling to get my head round that bit. Cheers

[edmokeski]

I'm in a secondary of about 1000 users. We initially (before the release of Team Drives) uploaded ours to a central "shared drives" folder owned by an admin user, and then shared that out to all staff. GAM used to have a little how-to on doing this centrally, but I can't find it at the minute. Since we did it at point of initial Drive rollout, we just walked everyone through fetching it out of their Shared With Me and using Add to My Drive rather than using GAM for it.

 

Once Team Drives came out, we migrated to those. Our old Windows shares were set up as three shares (for different purposes/permissions/etc.), with a folder for each department within each of those shares. Our Team Drives are set up with three Team Drives per department to roughly mirror this. Users are only given access to Team Drives that are relevant to them, which means only a few of us have to put up with seeing the whole list.

 

There are pros and cons to each approach. Team Drives is more elegant, and seems to fit better into teachers' mental model of "stuff in My Drive is mine, stuff in Team Drives is shared, just like it was with My Docs and the network shares in Windows." However there are a few places Google still haven't implemented it properly (e.g. an "add a file" type dialogue that only shows My Drive). More significantly, permissions work differently on Team Drives, meaning that a) those managing them day-to-day (HoDs for us) need to understand the two different systems of permissions, and b) granular permissions are quite limited compared to My Drive (which was already a bit limited compared to Windows shares).

 

Against Team Drives, I wish the permissions were more granular etc., as I hate telling teachers that permissions features they're used to using aren't supported. However, for it, I haven't any more got teachers getting confused about shared resources sitting w/in their My Drive and going through and deleting everything they didn't want (happened in our first year -- luckily not too difficult to set right, or trace the culprit).

 

Wish I could say "definitely do it X way," but YMMV depending on your situation and your users' experience/expectations!

Edited January 8, 2019 by edmokeski

[robjduk]

I encourage departments to setup their own team drives then using Google file stream they can drag and drop resources easily across to the team drive from the old windows share.

[bossman]

As @robjduk has said....

 

Works a treat.....

[Danp]

Following on from this, what do you do about backups?

[robjduk]

try to nudge people to use Google docs.

[Danp]

try to nudge people to use Google docs.

 

I thought that was going to be the reply. I feel that might be a step too far at this stage. I think I may need to looking into something like Spinbackup