G Drive Overview

G Drive is a cloud based file storage system with many similarities to other services such as Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, and others. In a nutshell, with G Drive you can:

• Store files "in the cloud" and have them available on multiple devices
• Manage permissions of who can access those files
• Manage multiple document versions and track changes
• Work with files even when you are offline, and let the system take care of synchronization

This article has several sections, presented in order of importance of understanding. Make sure to read File Locations first, and understand it. Then move on to File Ownership, and finally File Identity. The last two are advance topics that you will eventually need, but feel free to skip them on first reading or you may get overwhelmed. But do come back here and read this again when directed in another article - there is a reason why I write all this.

File Locations

There are three different location pieces to G Drive and you need to understand them:

• My Drive
• Shared Drives
• Shared with me

My Drive (singular) is for your personal use. The files that your create in My Drive are owned by you, and when your account is closed, the files disappear and are gone forever, but while your account exists, you can never lose permission to access your files there. When you have multiple Google Accounts, each account has a separate My Drive: I have something like 6 different Google accounts and manage even more (don't ask!) and I would have to work pretty hard to figure out which of my files are stored where. So, to spare myself much anguish, I don't use My Drive except in the one account that is my primary personal account. Although you are the owner, you can invite others to access the file; this is called Sharing. When you share a file with another person (another Google account, really), you give them explicit permissions (your choice which uses you allow) to do some things with the file: view it; edit it; share it with others - there are many different combinations of options. The other person gets an email informing them that you are sharing, and can then work with the file according to the permissions given.

Shared Drives (plural) on the other hand are designed for team collaboration. Shared Drives are associated with an organization and not any single person. When a file is placed into a Shared Drive, it becomes property of the organization, and even if you created it, and later you leave the organization and your account is closed, the files stay behind. You get the right to see and work with the files in a Shared Drive of your organization because you are a member of a team that uses the drive; you are "a member of the Shared Drive." You can lose permission to access the files in a Shared Drive if you cease to be a member of the team/the Shared Drive. Just like with files in My Drive, you can share files from a Shared Drive. What this does is that it sets up additional permissions for the file, beyond what was intended by the permissions placed on the Shared Drive in which the file resides and also makes the file visible in the "Shared with me" list. This of course may be both good and bad. I have decided not to share files from a Shared Drive to avoid any possibility of circumventing permissions, even inadvertently. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but you really want to understand what you are doing.

Shared with me is a place where you can find files that somebody else shared with you (gave you permissions to work with). Those files are owned by somebody else, but you can work with them according to the permissions that you were given (view, edit, comment on, and more). The list can get pretty long, and so you can organize the files that have been shared with you by moving them into the My Drive and use your own folder structure with the shared files. One thing to be aware of though: Even though the shared file may be listed in your My Drive (or a folder within in), you do not own it, and the owner may decided at any time to delete the file or revoke your permissions, and the file will disappear from Shared me with me or from My Drive. If you have the permission, you may make a copy of the file and the copy will be owned by you so nobody can else deleted, but of course, it will now be a different file and any changes you make to it will not appear in the original source of the copy.

File Ownership

The information in this section is just another way of looking at some of the information already mentioned in this article, but is organized differently and may give you a different perspective on the topic.

Files that are stored in the G Drive cloud have various properties associated with them, and one of the important properties of a file is who owns it. Files can be owned by:

• You, or more specifically, the account that you are logged in with - remember, "you" the person can have several accounts, and so "you" refers to the currently logged-in account. This is important to know occasionally, since G Suite Apps display "me" when they really mean the currently logged-in account - always look at upper right corner to see which "me" this really is. I've been tripped by this a few times myself. Worse, the apps display the profile name, and all my profile names are "Martin Vlach." Luckily, the apps also display the profile picture - the same one at the right top corner of the account - and this is the reason why it is helpful for others to have your picture or unique image in your profile.
• Somebody else, or more specifically, another account - and it may be "you the person," but under another account.
• The team (not an individual account). Files in a Shared Drive do not have individual ownership, they are always owned by the team.

So, why is this important?

• Files in My Drive or the Shared with me list show ownership. If they are owned by somebody else, that somebody can delete the file or revoke your permissions at any time. Files owned by you are under your control. You will notice that these two locations display file ownership in a list of files.
• Files in the Shared Drives do not have ownership and so cannot display that information in a list of files.

As a consequence of these rules, moving files among the three Locations has some restrictions:

• If you own a file in My Drive, you may move the file to Shared Drives because this constitutes change of ownership and you are the owner so you can decide. Conversely, if you do not own a file, you cannot move it to Shared Drives, whether from the Shared with me list or from My Drive where you may have moved it earlier from Shared with me.
• If you have the permissions for a file in Shared Drives, you may move the file to another drive- but be aware that if you move it out of Shared Drives to My Drive, nobody else on the team will have access to the file any more, and if you move it to another team drive, the access permissions will change.

File Identity

In G Drive, unlike many other similar services or common operating systems (Windows, Macs, Linux), it is possible to have different files with the same name in a folder or a drive. The identity of a file is not linked to its full name (folder/folder/file). The identity is in fact that horrible string of characters in the URL address you see in the browser address bar. The file name is just another property of the file.

I mostly say this because my inner geek compels me - there are very few consequences to how files are used, but for those who are used to working with files in Windows or on a Mac, it may come as a surprise to see two files with the same name in one folder. So now you have an inner geek too.