Organizations that use G Suite have two places to store files: My Drive and Team Drives. Users control the files on My Drive. They’re files the user created, stored, or allowed to be stored on My Drive. A Team Drive, in contrast, gives more people access: Every member with full access can add files to a Team Drive, and every member with edit access can modify the content of a file on a Team Drive.
This distinction between who controls files on My Drive and a Team Drive has important implications for file management. For example, consider file deletion. A user can control when a file gets deleted from My Drive, since they are the owner of those files. But any member with full access can delete a file from a Team Drive. And when one member deletes a file from a Team Drive, all members of the Team Drive lose access to it.
As you work with Team Drives, try the following four tips to help prevent problems or recover data. To implement the first two tips, you’ll need to be a Team Drive owner or a member of a Team Drive with full access.
1. Manage member access levels
The simplest way to ensure that files remain on a Team Drive is to change the access level to Edit access for most members. Edit access allows a person both to add files to a Team Drive and to edit existing files on the drive. More importantly, edit access removes the ability to move or delete files. Lower levels of access, such Comment access or View access restrict the potential for changes even further.
To modify access levels for an existing Team Drive on mobile, open the Team Drive, select the three dot menu (in the upper right corner), choose Manage members. Select the down-pointing arrow to the right of the account you wish to modify. Change the access level as desired.
2. Restore files or folders
Members with either Full access or Edit access may restore files or folders that have been moved to the Trash (e.g., items that have been deleted from a Team Drive). For example, if Bob has Edit access and Alice has Full access permissions to a Team Drive and Alice deletes an item, then either Bob or Alice can locate the item in the Trash folder for the Drive and restore it. People with Comment access or View access should be able to see that an item has been moved to the Trash for the Team Drive, but they won’t have the ability to restore it to the Team Drive.
But there are limits to this ability to restore. If an item has been in the Trash for 25 days or so, it may be auto-emptied from the Trash. After that, neither Alice nor Bob will be able to access it. Also, if Alice moves the item to Trash, then deliberately goes into the Trash and empties the Trash, then similarly, neither of them will be able to restore the items. (source)
3. Use UpSafe G Suite backup
UpSafe backup is a perfect fit to ensure the protection of your Team Drives as well as emails, contacts and calendars.
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