Shared Drives Overview

Purpose / Objectives

Purpose: Google 'Shared Drives' are owned by the university and managed by users who created them. Usage will be billed to your department.

The university previously had unlimited storage. Now Google is charging based on usage. Clean up these drives to avoid excessive charges to your department.

Many drives managed by people who are no longer at the university, and those will gradually be deleted. If you use files in those drives you may lose access.

Objectives: After this tutorial, you should be able to:

Backup and remove your personal data from a shared drive.
Communicate with other users of the shared drive to determine what should be done ('Claim') with the shared drive, and select this option in the CAT tool.
Remove users who no longer need access
Delete a shared drive no longer needed.

The goal is to review, claim, and clean up Shared Drives. This complex process requires collaboration between the multiple members of each Shared Drive. This page will serve as a general overview of this process. Please check this page often, as we will continue to update it with descriptions and tutorials for review, claim, and clean up as they become available.

STEP 1 - Clean Up Shared Drives and Remove Inactive Members

Review Shared Drives for non work-related personal data (required).
- Back up and remove any personal data that you find (recommended).
- Notify members of personal Shared Drives that the drives will be deleted (recommended).
- Delete personal data and personal Shared Drives from your Virginia Tech Google account (required).
  - How to Delete a Google Shared Drive - VT tutorial
Remove inactive members of each shared drive.
- Use 'Manage Members' to remove people who should no longer have access, especially former Managers and Content Managers. See Instructions
- Delete all unneeded Work-related files from each Shared Drive (required).
  - Working collaboratively with other members of your shared drive, delete files and folders that you no longer need, keeping in mind Records Retention Policy 2000. (required).