Google Drive Management: Solving Real-World School Admin Scenarios

With thousands of Drive files in the school domain, keeping all data under control is challenging without the right tools. 

While the Google Admin Console is fundamental for the IT team’s daily work, it falls short when it comes to quickly moving, tracking, and investigating specific files, their ownership, and access to them. 

Here, we’ve gathered a few real admin use cases for Shared Drive management and file auditing, and show how to solve them with the GAT Labs toolset.

How to Review All Shared Drives in Your Domain

Your starting point is discovering what exists in your domain: personal and Shared Drives, files and folders, their ownership, who can access them, and when they were last shared or accessed.

To better visualize your domain’s structure, you can export a tree view of all Shared Drives to a Google Sheet using GAT+.

With an overview of the key elements your domain currently includes, you can begin to control granularly what Drives specific users can access. 

To change file sharing and user permissions of your Shared Drives, navigate to the Drive Audit section of GAT+. There, from one place, you can modify a specific Drive:

• Change the sharing settings (restricting access to admins only; sharing only within the domain or with Drive members, etc.).
• Manage user permissions (adding, removing, or replacing existing users as Contributors, Viewers, Commenters, Managers, Content Managers)

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📌 ADMIN TIP
To strengthen the protection of sensitive data stored in your Google domain, consider removing all external (outside the domain) viewers, contributors, and commenters from all Shared Drives owned by the school principal and teachers.

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How to Securely Manage User Access Permissions in Google Workspace for Education

Shared Drives and Files Auditing: Real-Life Use Cases

Let’s move to a school admin’s office like you. In the fast-paced educational environment, he faces unexpected challenges daily and tries to handle them quickly to keep student data secure. At the same time, he aims to optimize his job, looking for handy shortcuts and smart solutions.

These are some of the issues real Google admins deal with and how to address them with GAT Labs.

1. How to Move Files from a My Drive into a Shared Drive?

This task is particularly common during offboarding, when a teacher or another staff member leaves the institution, and some important data (e.g., student assessments, curriculum) remains on their personal Drive. Transferring these files to a Shared Drive will preserve them after the leaver’s personal account is deleted.

Our Solution:

1. Change ownership of the files you plan to transfer.
   In GAT+, find and select all the files and change the owner to yourself (or an account you control). Select the files and move them to a specific new folder in your own My Drive.
2. Make the actual transfer via drive.google.com.
   Drag and drop the files from your My Drive to the Shared Drive. You can also use GAT+ to quickly make yourself the manager on all the required Shared Drives to ensure you have full access.

2. How to Alert Active Users that Their Drive Data is Pending Deletion?

Reducing storage costs is the holy grail for every admin. One tactic to achieve this is to free up Google Drive storage across the domain. Since Google has limited free storage for higher education institutions to 100TB, admins need to regularly review large but unnecessary data to optimize domain spending. In schools, the best time for the Drive clean-up is during the summer break or at the end of the year.

Our Solution:

1. Identify large user data on Shared and personal Drives.
   In GAT+, review the used space quota in Drive for the entire domain and each user. It also finds large files exceeding a specific size. 
2. Apply labels to files to notify users about planning deletion.
   In the File tab of the Drive section, select all files you want to label. Update Drive labels and choose the “On Hold” label for them. You can filter files so the label applies only to those owned by users in a specific OU. 

Free up Storage in Google Workspace for Education Before Google Ends Unlimited Storage

3. How to Audit Specific Drive Files and User Actions on Them?

Picture this: a cyberbullying case arose at your school. It could be a disrespectful story about a teacher or an AI-generated deepfake video featuring a student’s face. 

Apparently, the harmful content has been downloaded and saved in a Shared Drive. The challenge lies not only in localizing the original file but also in stopping users from spreading it and its copies across the school network.

Our Solution:

1. Identify the harmful file in the school domain.
   In GAT+, enter Full Content Search, then insert a query containing specific keywords to find the given file across your domain. It will scan file title, description, comments, text content, and text within images and videos.
2. Audit the users’ actions on the file.
   In the Events section of the file’s details, you can see who viewed, edited, copied, downloaded, printed it, whether the owner has been changed, and more. The information is available up to 5 years backward.
3. Search for duplicate files.
   In the Files column of the Drive section, filter for duplicate files using a custom filter, such as user and date last updated. The results will show the number of copies of the file and its path in Google Drive. You can view or download it. 
4. Remove the harmful files via the Google My Drive.
   If you need to change the ownership of these files to delete them, follow the steps described in the first use case.
5. Track the file to monitor further spreading.
   Schedule customizable reports on files containing specific keywords or owned by specific users to keep track of new copies of the harmful file and manage them. You’ll be notified when a searched text query has been found across the domain or the group of students.

4. How to Identify Drive Files with Public Access Permissions and Restrict Their Sharing?

In the primary schools, students must usually be collected only by authorized adults. Imagine that you just found out (accidentally, as it usually does) that a kid accessed a file containing personal information about students, including their parents’ and guardians’ contact information. 

Besides “closing” access to this specific file, you need to audit whether there are more files with public access permissions that should be restricted. You need to act quickly, because anyone can search the sensitive file now.

Our Solution:

1. Review publicly accessible files.
   In the GAT+ dashboard, enter the Drive tab and see the number of files with “Drive open to full public” permission on the relevant tile. Click to see details of a file (including the owner and when it was created) and its path.
2. Search for the latest vulnerable files.
   You can filter publicly available files with the time-scope parameter; for instance, those that haven’t been accessed recently or those that have been made public within the last three months.
3. Change the file sharing permissions.
   For the chosen files, remove permissions on all internal and external shares, and replace the “Public” permission with “Public at [your domain] with link.”

Closing Thoughts

Efficient Shared Drive management is essential for maintaining your school’s sensitive data safe and staying compliant with COPPA, FERPA, and GDPR. Additionally, ensuring user access to relevant files and Drives supports daily classroom collaboration between students and teachers.

We hope the cases above let you streamline your Drive file auditing and management. Don’t see a Google Drive issue you’re struggling with? Contact GAT Labs Support Team, and we’ll figure it out together.

FAQ: Shared Drive Auditing & Management

How to quickly check all Shared Drive permissions?

You can review each Shared Drive’s members and their access permissions in the Google Admin Console. Use GAT+ to audit all Shared Drives at once, including their permissions for internal and external sharing, and manage user access in the same dashboard.

How to prevent accidental sharing of student data from a school’s Shared Drive with external users?

Audit all external shares of files and folders across your Google domain. GAT+ will allow you to restrict sharing permissions to admins or domain users only in bulk. Consider removing all external viewers and contributors from Shared Drives containing sensitive data. Schedule automated alerts when a Google Drive file is shared outside the domain.

How does Shared Drive auditing improve the school’s performance?

Regular review of ownership, permissions, and used storage space across all Shared Drives helps protect sensitive information, reduce the risk of unauthorized data disclosure, enable efficient collaboration, and optimize Google domain costs. This kind of Drive monitoring is possible with advanced tools like GAT+ reports.