Along with your own drive (My Drive), Google Drive offers shared drives. Use these to collaborate with team members and control permissions for who can create, move, share and access files both within the University and externally.

In a shared drive, the files belong to the team instead of an individual. This means that if the person who created the file leaves Monash, the file remains fully accessible from the shared drive.

Set up a shared drive

1. Submit a Service Desk request for a shared drive.
2. Add members and set permissions – see the section on adding members.
3. Add files and folders – see add files and folders to a shared drive.
4. Share and collaborate with your team. For help, see the Productivity Guide for Google shared drives.

Features

For a full list of features and tips, see shared drive tips.

Access a shared drive on your computer

You can access and manage your files from:

• any device by going to drive.google.com
• your smartphone with the Google Drive app, available in:
  • the App Store (mac and iPhone)
  • Google Play (Windows and Android)
• on any computer through the Google Drive for desktop app (see below).

Google Drive for desktop on your Monash laptop

The Google Drive desktop app is a quick and easy way to access your files, and it's already available on your Monash computer.

Once you've opened the app and signed in, follow the steps below.

Google Drive for desktop on non-Monash computers

Access and permissions

You can set different access levels for individual members. To learn more, see access levels.

Move and delete files

Moving an existing Google document to a shared drive retains the change history and earlier versions.

If you delete a file, you delete it for everyone in the Shared Drive. If you have edit or full access, you can restore it from the bin for up to 30 days before it's deleted forever. To learn more, see delete and restore files.

Suggested use

Shared drives should be used for information and data that is critical to your team, business unit, project, or study collaboration, especially when the data needs to remain available even if one of the contributors is on leave, absent or leaves Monash.

Versions

You can store every version of each file for 30 days and revert back to any version at any time. You can also mark a file to store versions forever, overriding the default 30-day window.