How to use Drive Management day to day. For what your tier includes and how to set it up, see Drive Management: getting started.
Key features
Three things to know about before you start.
- Your tier sets what you can do. Drive Management is included from Essential upwards. Essential gives full control of My Drive and read-only visibility of shared drives. Pro adds acting on the drives themselves. Enterprise adds bulk actions across your whole estate. See Drive Management: getting started for the full breakdown.
- Activity history is a searchable timeline of what is happening in Google Drive: who did what, to which file, and when. It covers edits, sharing changes, moves, deletions and membership changes, and appears across the whole organisation, per drive, per user and per file.
- Bulk actions apply one change across a large set of shared drives. You choose what to target, review exactly what CloudM found, then run it. Nothing happens until you do. Enterprise only.
The shared drives list
The Shared Drives page lists every shared drive in your domain.
- Search by drive name.
- Filter by organisational unit and sync status, with More filters for members, managers and permissions.
- Sort by drive name, members, managers, files or size.
- Choose 10, 20 or 50 results per page.
Columns
Every column is configurable except the drive name, which is always shown: managers, members, organisational unit, file count, public links, size, sync status and created date.
Drives nobody is managing
A good first place to look after your initial sync. Shared drives with no manager are flagged, and you can see just those using More filters > Managers > Unmanaged.
Working with a drive
Refresh pulls the latest data already held in CloudM. Create a shared drive creates a new drive and sets its initial permissions; at least one user or group manager is required.
The ellipsis menu on any row gives that drive's actions: view the drive, open it in Google Drive, sync now, update drive settings, update organisational unit, manage members and roles, rename, and delete.
These actions need the Pro tier or above. On Essential the menu is visible but greyed out, with a prompt to upgrade.
Selecting more than one drive lets you apply an action across all of them, up to 50 at a time: update drive settings, add a member, update organisational unit, or delete. For larger sets, see bulk actions below.
The drive summary
Selecting any column after the drive name opens a summary page with three tabs: Overview, Security & policies and Members. An Activity tab shows what has happened in that drive.
Inside a drive
Open the drive to see its statistics and actions in the header, with folder and file browsing beneath. Navigate using breadcrumbs, scrolling continuously through large drives. You can search, filter and sort, and choose which columns to show. The Bin is available from every screen.
Act on a folder or file from its ellipsis menu: manage access, rename, move, copy link, or move to bin. Selecting a row opens the details panel, where you can see sharing settings and members and change permissions in place.
File information is read live from Google each time you browse. Nothing is copied into Automate, so what you see always reflects Google Drive at that moment.
Activity history
Activity history is a searchable timeline of what is happening in Google Drive: who did what, to which file, and when. It records edits, sharing changes, moves, deletions and membership changes.
It is the same view in four places, each scoped to what you are looking at:
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Drive Management > Activity History | Activity across the whole organisation |
| The Activity tab on a shared drive | Activity within that drive |
| The Drive Activity tab on a user | Actions that user performed, or activity on files they own |
| A file's action menu | The history of that single file |
Drive Management > Activity History
Drive Management > Shared Drives
Directory > Users > Select User > Drive Activity
Filter by date and time, event type, person and drive. A filtered view keeps its filters in the page address, so you can bookmark a view you check regularly, or send the link to a colleague and they will see the same results.
Values in the table are links. Select a user, drive or folder to go straight to it. Selecting a file name opens that file's details.
Worth checking regularly
- Sharing changes on sensitive drives. Filter the drive, then filter to sharing events, and bookmark the result.
- What a leaver did before they left. Open their Drive Activity tab and set the date range to their last few weeks.
- What happened to a file. Open activity history from the file's action menu rather than searching the organisation-wide view.
This is not the same as the CloudM audit log. The audit log records changes made through CloudM. Activity history records what happened in Google Drive, whoever did it and wherever they did it.
Bulk actions on shared drives
Bulk actions apply a single change across a large set of shared drives. You choose what to target, CloudM works out which drives match and shows you the list, and nothing happens until you run it.
Bulk actions require the Enterprise tier. On Essential and Pro you can open the configuration and see how it works, but the run option is not available.
How this differs from selecting drives on screen
Ticking drives on the Shared Drives page applies an action to the drives you have ticked, up to 50 at a time, and is available from Pro upwards. Bulk actions go further: you target a much larger set, review exactly what CloudM found, and then run it. The two are easy to confuse and they are not the same feature.
Running a bulk action
- Choose what to target: up to 50 shared drives you select, all shared drives, or every drive matching your conditions. You can combine up to five conditions.
- Choose the action to apply.
- CloudM prepares the job in the background and saves the drives that match.
- Review the prepared list. This is exactly the set the action will run against.
- Run the job, or discard it.
Preparing a job changes nothing. Nothing happens until you run it. A prepared job you do not run expires after five days.
Limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Drives you can select on screen | 50 |
| Conditions you can combine | 5 |
| Drives saved in a prepared job | 1,000 |
| How long a prepared job lasts if not run | 5 days |
If your conditions match more than 1,000 drives, narrow them and run more than one job.
Results
Each drive reports its own result of completed, skipped or failed, so a partial result is normal on a large job. Anything that failed can be retried without rebuilding the job.
A drive is usually skipped because the action does not apply to it, and usually fails because it has no active manager inside your domain. Adding an internal user as a manager resolves that.
Recommendation cards
Recommendation cards work the same way. Each card acts on every drive matching its condition, so review the prepared list before running one. Recommendation cards are Enterprise only.
Viewing a user's My Drive
- Go to Directory > Users.
- Open the user's record.
- Select the My Drive tab.
From here you can see the user's files and how much storage they are using, folders and files shared with them, and the Bin. You can act on files, and transfer ownership of a file to another user. The user's record also carries a Drive Activity tab.
Filter and sort by name, type, link access, and modified or created date, and choose 10, 20 or 50 results per page.
Ownership transfer applies to individual files only. Google does not support transferring ownership of a folder along with its contents. It also applies to My Drive only, because content in a shared drive is owned by the organisation rather than an individual.
My Drive is available on every tier that includes Drive Management, including Essential.
Troubleshooting
I can see the bulk actions screen but cannot run a job
Essential and Pro can open the configuration. Running a prepared job requires Enterprise.
A drive's file count or public link count looks out of date
Those come from the per-drive details sync, which runs roughly every five days per drive. Use Sync Now on that drive to refresh them.
An action on a shared drive fails
Actions need the drive to have an active manager inside your domain. That includes drives whose only manager is an external user or a group, which will not appear in the unmanaged drives filter. Adding an internal user as a manager resolves it.
My prepared bulk job has disappeared
Prepared jobs expire after five days. Prepare it again.
Files differ from what I see in Google Drive
File information is read live rather than stored, so a difference is not a sync delay. It usually reflects sharing permissions in Google Drive itself.