Inside UCR

Updated Google workspace shared drive permissions

September 25, 2024
Information Technology Solutions
September 25, 2024

UCR’s Shared Drive terms of use have changed. The ability to create new Shared Drives is currently only available to faculty, staff, and affiliates. Students are encouraged to use their personal drives (My Drive) to store coursework and other academic (non-research) data. These guidelines allow UCR to comply with its vendor-determined storage allocation and is consistent with the university’s commitment to data continuity and modern storage hygiene practices. 

Shared Drives for Research, Administrative Work, and Recognized Student Organizations

If a Shared Drive is needed to collaborate on and store university-owned work, such as research data, administrative information, or student org files, a Shared Drive should be created by an active university employee (i.e., faculty, PI, staff supervisor, Student Life point person) who can then invite contributors, including students, to the drive. To uphold the university’s expectations around data continuity, it is important that Shared Drives are owned and managed by active UCR employees as this ensures continuous access to the data. In the event of your departure from UCR, ownership of a Shared Drive should be transferred to an active employee to avoid any data loss. 

New Shared Drives 

New Shared Drives created by faculty default to 1 TB of storage per drive while new Shared Drives created by staff and affiliates default to 5 GB per drive. In the event additional storage is needed, please contact ITS to request an increase. 

Existing Shared Drives

Existing Shared Drives that were created by active UCR faculty, students, staff, and affiliates are grandfathered into this change and, as such, the data within them should not be affected. Please note, however, that caps will be placed on existing Shared Drives to ensure they meet new storage standards. It is also important to note that alumni, former students, retirees, and emeriti are not eligible for campus storage beyond their personal Workspace storage quota. Please refer to the Google Workspace Storage Quotas article for more information.