Create a Shared Drive and Manage Members

To create a Shared Drive, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to your bDrive.
  2. Click on Shared Drives.
  3. Click + New.
  4. You will be prompted to enter a name for your Shared Drive. Use a name that clearly represents the Department/unit/team or project using the Shared drive. 
  5. Click create. 

Highlight Shared drives and click + New to create a Shared drive

Be sure you understand Membership and permissions/roles of a Shared drive.

  • All members of a Shared drive have access to all content in the Shared drive. 
  • Unlike in My Drive, there is no way to exclude a member from any single file or folder inside of a Shared drive. 
  • Consider the five levels of permissions and roles for each member of the Shared drive carefully as these permissions extend to everything in the Shared drive. 
  • If you need someone to have access to only a subset of the content in a Shared drive, do not add them as a member. Instead control their access to a folder or file by sharing items directly as you normally would in My Drive. 
  • A Shared drive is additive only in its permissions, you cannot subtract. 
  • Note that an easy way to manage your Shared drive membership might be to create a bConnected List, which is a Berkeley Google Group and add that group to the Shared drive with the correct level of access. Then as you need to change the members of your department/unit/team, simply do so in the bConnected List. Learn more about creating a bConnected List

Google Shared drive permissions

Once you have your membership list determined, you can begin inviting members to the Shared Drive following these easy steps:

  1. Once you have created your Shared Drive, you can double-click on it to open it up. 
  2. You can find Manage members from the drop-down or use the link to the right that says Manage members. 
  3. Start typing the name of the individual or Google Group you would like to add.
  4. Determine the appropriate permission for the member from the drop-down. 
  5. Add a message if you would like to notify them of their new membership. 
  6. Click Send.
  7. The person you invited will now see the Shared Drive when they click on Shared Drives from their Google Drive. 

Add Members to a Shared drive

Note: If you need to move a lot of content into your Shared Drive, see Moving Content into a Shared Drive.

Steps to create and manage Google Shared Drives

We have a set of Video Tutorials about Shared Drives and how to move your content into them. These will cover everything you need to know. It should take about 30 minutes to watch all of them.

Info: Overview of Shared Drives

Info: Find your Shared Drive Usage

Info: My Drive vs. Shared drives vs. Shared with me

How-to: Create a Shared Drive and manage Members

How-to: Moving content into a Shared drive