New beta available that restricts access to folders in Google Drive

[Kim_Nilsson]

Naaaaajs! 🙂

We've been waiting for this since Teamdrives was introduced, and now we're getting hints of it becoming reality.

It's a beta, with all that entails.

New beta available that restricts access to folders in Google Drive

[tic_manolo]

Ya la tengo activada y es una función muy útil para los Administradores.

[Meghan]

I cannot wait for this to be available!

[kaned]

I signed up for the beta but never got it, just was seriously help clean up some of my folder structures. 

I'm very excited for this!

[Meghan]

Is this still a possibility?  Does anyone know where it stands?  Otherwise I need to create a lot of new Shared Drives.  

Is there any news on this?  https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/09/google-drive-beta-to-restrict-folder-access.html#:~:....

[Olger]

Just in case noone here has found it yet, I discovered Limited Access Folders last week. This is no longer in beta.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/14254362?visit_id=638791444213564787-3760234980&p=drive_limi...

"The feature rollout to Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains started on February 18, 2025"

It's a complete rethink of how we'll do Shared Drive permissions. I've been waiting for this ever since I started with Google Workspace.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Yeah, and the change of logic isn't voluntary. This is now how folders in a Shared Drive work.

By the way, you can shorten the URL to the support article to not include the tracking information of your visit. This bit is enough.

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

[Olger]

Not sure I'm following? You don't have to change a folder to a limited access folder, you can still opt to leave things as they were, unless there's some other related change I'm not aware of. To me this is a good change, not being able to restrict access mid folder structure was way too limiting.

Point taken regarding the URL. I just blindly copy/pasted.

[Kim_Nilsson]

I mean, you can't choose to not allow people to use limited access. There's no admin control.

If they have the appropriate role, they can limit access.

[Olger]

I see what you mean. I guess in our situation thats not a concern as we (IT) manage the shared drives and only give ourselves (greedy, I know) manager access (which means we can set up limited access folders). Content Managers access is granted to 'normal' peeps where necessary. 

The only thing I wish they had included with this is to restrict who can delete a (limited access) folder. And allow shortcuts to the root of a shared drive. We've set up our shared drives similar to how we used to have Windows shared folders, because that works well for people. And with that we'd really need to limit the option to delete the root folders in drives.

Maybe one day.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Yes, shortcuts to (the root of) Shared Drives would have been nice. Keep pushing that as feedback in Drive. The team reads all feedback.

Yeah, restricting deletion of folders, while still allowing sharing, is a fine grained option that's still missing. Will only get it if we keep asking for it. That feedback button is key!

[Olger]

Done and done. 😄

[kaned]

I signed up for the beta but have not heard anything since.

Alo very excited about this feature!

[alexgrutza]

We have this ability now. It will reignite the discussion internally of migrating our on-prem file server to Drive now that there are some granular settings (by far not close to NTFS, but better than nothing)