Google gives people who use G Suite Business, Enterprise, Education, or Nonprofit editions two distinct types of Google Drive storage: My Drive and Team Drives. Both serve as a reliable place to store, organize, and share files. Yet, there’s one major difference between the two: When you add a file to a Team Drive, all members of the Team Drive gain access to the file, but when you add a file to My Drive, your file remains private by default.
Google also gives G Suite administrators the ability to adjust the default file access and sharing settings for Google Drive and Team Drives. Most G Suite administrators review and configure Google Drive settings during the initial G Suite deployment, but Google recently added more settings in mid-2018 to help secure Team Drive data.
Review the following settings to manage, protect, and monitor your organization’s Team Drives. You’ll need a G Suite administrator account for your organization to access Admin console settings.
1. Manage Team Drives
In many cases, your organization’s default Google Drive sharing settings also serve as the default Team Drive sharing settings. Sign in to the G Suite admin console (at admin.google.com), then navigate to Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs > Sharing Settings. Review these setting to ensure that external sharing is either allowed or restricted appropriately.
Immediately below the Sharing settings section, you’ll see Team Drive creation controls. Each of these five options prevents a different action. Any selection made here applies to ALL of the organization’s Team Drives. For example, a G Suite administrator at an organization especially concerned with security could select all five of these options, which would result in Team Drive access being restricted solely to people within an organization, and with only members of a Team Drive being able to access files on that Team Drive. Such a configuration would also constrain downloading, copying, and printing of files from the Team Drive.
A more frequently-used configuration might be to check only the “Prevent full-access members from modifying Team Drive settings” option. This ensures that a G Suite administrator can select the sharing, membership, and content action options allowed (i.e., access to download, copy, or print) for each Team Drive, without the risk that a full-access member might modify these settings.
2. Protect Team Drive content
A G Suite administrator may also review and adjust membership, sharing, and content action settings for all Team Drives. Again, login to the Admin console (admin.google.com), then navigate to Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs > Team Drive > Manage Team Drives.
For each Team Drive an administrator may choose to enable or disable:
Sharing outside the organization
Sharing with non-members
The ability of people to download, copy, and print files from the Team Drive
And, for each Team Drive, the administrator may also prevent Team Drive members with full-access from modifying these settings. (source)
3. Backup Team Drives
UpSafe G Suite Backup provides the additional protection layer, which ensures that your most critical data won’t be lost or corrupted.
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