🌟📁Limited Access folders is HUGE for Shared Drives in Google Drive!!!

[Bill_Gibson]

Now teams can easily onboard new members via group membership while providing logically organized sub folders for content that is appropriate for a smaller audience.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/14254362

[alexgrutza]

I've been trying to understand this change to our users, and whether it's applied to only My Drive and/or also Shared Drives (I'm thinking both).

Say a user had shared a single file within a shared My Drive folder of theirs, but did not give that individual user access to the shared My Drive folder when prompted. When google makes this change (now and moving forward, and also in 2026 when they retroactively apply this logic to all files/folders), does this manually added user (regardless of what level of permission they had [ie. viewer, editor, etc]) to the file (but not the folder) A) lose access to the file or B) get added to the folder (in which the file resides) as having permission now?

[Kim_Nilsson]

Veeeeeery slow response here. 🙂

The update only brings Shared Drives in line with the experience and function of My Drive. It changes nothing in My Drive.

No user will get more access than before. Nor will they lose access to something they have been given specific access to.

[kaned]

We are looking to consolidate a bunch of our shared drives now that this feature has been rolled out.  I'm hoping October will be a productive month while working with offices to consolidate some of this.

[Justin_W]

I'm trying to better understand the change in the context which you've provided.

Can you elaborate as to how this changes things for you?

[Bill_Gibson]

Previously when someone was given access to a shared drive, they would maintain that access for all of the contents of the shared drive. As a result, we encountered hesitation of moving data to this model as there were often times content that was related to the team/project, but not intended for everyone's review.

With this change, sub-folders of files can be set to a limited audience that should have access to this subset of info while limiting the full team's access. As a bonus, non-team members can also be added to these Limited-Access folders allowing for further customization of who should have access to these files.

This is a pretty good explainer video starting at 1:58

[Justin_W]

Thanks.

So really it's just adding more existing "standard" Folder Share setting to Shared Drives.  

I can see the benefit. 

[Bill_Gibson]

I've joked...."Did you find that NTFS permissions confused your users??? We're one step closer to that world"

...but as you can tell from the subject line, I think this is a very positive and worthwhile improvement to the file permissions offering of Google Drive

[Claudia17]

Aggiornamento utilissimo, così anche a scuola non dobbiamo creare tante cartelle diverse con lo stesso nome per condividere solo alcuni contenuti. Ora lo spiegherò ai docenti della mia scuola, grazie