Hey everyone, how’s it going? Grab a seat, cause here comes a story…
After several days of searching the internet and waiting 40 minutes on a call to get through to Google support (with no success), I’m here to ask about how Google Shared Drives work. Here’s the thing:
We use Google Drive at the company through Google Workspace Business. Since we’re a team, we gave up using Shared Drives in order to have more control over who accesses what, and so everyone can keep their @company email account. Everything is done using the Google program for Windows, which syncs the content and makes everything online available offline as well.
But I ran into a minor issue: as far as I understand, when using Google Shared Drive, if you set a file (or folder) to “Online-only” so it doesn’t take up space on your storage, the program simply doesn’t remove that file from your storage. It marks it as an online-only item, but it’s still physically saved. There’s a setting in the Google Drive program to either keep everything offline or do it on demand, but that only applies to files in “My Drive,” which is the directory Google creates individually for each @company account. Changing that has ZERO effect on the Shared Drives.
Now I have several team members with full SSDs, and I can’t find a simple way to make the Google program understand that when you set something to online-only, it should remove the file from that machine. We used Dropbox before, and it was much simpler — it understood the command and removed the file. I don’t know if that’s because it was a personal account back then or not, since it was a standard Dropbox, not Business.
Here’s the thing: we have several Shared Drives, and for convenience, when people downloaded them, they just clicked on the Shared Drive in question and set it to be offline. Only later they realized that some of the heavier folders don’t need to be loaded offline — especially since the SSDs on the machines aren’t that large — and I can’t find an easier way to fix this other than: CREATE a new Shared Drive, TRANSFER all the files to it, let the Google Drive on the machines understand that I did this, delete the old Shared Drive, and only then share this Shared Drive with them again — so that they can be careful and pay attention to which folders they set as available offline. That would bring another problem: some files already have their shareable links sent to clients for access, so those links would become useless.
But like, I find it hard to believe that Google doesn’t have a simpler solution! Oh, and for those who don’t know, these Shared Drive files aren’t actually “identifiable” on the machine. As I understand it, they’re stored like a cache, which you can only read and see the files of when the program is open. I even found this cache folder, but it’s full of thousands of separate files with names made of codes, so it’s not safe to delete them. Unlike Dropbox, which created a visible folder, easy to access, even with the sync program closed.
Anyone with experience with this and a better solution? Even Google couldn’t help me, lol. Though last time, the support agent didn’t understand anything about folder sharing, and I had to figure it out on my own…