Google Drive for business: pooled storage, Shared Drives and file control

Storage by edition, and the multiplication that matters

Every Business edition gives an allowance per licensed user, and Google adds those allowances together into one pool that the whole organisation draws from.

The practical consequence is that one heavy user does not break the account. A designer sitting on 400 GB of artwork in a twenty-person Business Standard organisation is using a small share of a 40 TB pool, and nothing stops the other nineteen people working. The reverse is also true: on Business Starter, a single person who uploads a few hundred large video files can consume most of a small office's pool on their own.

The pool counts everything the account holds, not just Drive files. Gmail messages and attachments, Google Photos content on the account, and files in Shared Drives all draw from the same total.

Four ways to get room back before you upgrade

1. Find the biggest consumers first. The Admin console shows storage used per user. In most Nepali offices the answer is video files, scanned PDFs of the same document saved five times, or a Gmail account nobody has emptied since 2019.
2. Empty the bins. Files in the Drive trash still count against the pool until they are permanently removed.
3. Move archives out of Drive. Completed project folders that nobody opens can go to an external drive or to hosting you already pay for, with a document in Drive recording where they went.
4. Then consider the edition. Moving from Starter to Standard multiplies the per-user allowance from 30 GB to 2 TB, which is usually a bigger jump than any clean-up. Compare the two on our Business Standard page.

My Drive or a Shared Drive?

This is the single decision that separates an office whose files survive staff changes from one that does not.

My Drive belongs to a person

Files created in someone's My Drive are owned by that user. They can be shared with colleagues, but ownership stays with the individual. When that person leaves and their account is deleted, the files go with the account unless they were transferred first.

A Shared Drive belongs to the organisation

Files in a Shared Drive are owned by the organisation, not by whoever uploaded them. Members come and go, the files stay. Shared Drives are available in all three Business editions, although Business Starter does not expose the full set of admin sharing controls that Standard and Plus do.

Sharing controls: who can see what leaves the building

Drive sharing is set both by the person sharing a file and by the administrator. At the organisation level an admin decides whether files can be shared outside your domain at all, whether people outside the organisation can be given editing rights, and whether "anyone with the link" is permitted. A consultancy that sends documents to overseas partners needs external sharing on. A finance team that never should needs it off for their organisational unit.

Two habits are worth enforcing from the first week. Share to a named address or a group rather than creating an open link, because an open link forwarded once is public forever. And review sharing on a folder before you put anything sensitive into it, because permissions inherit downwards. The wider security settings are covered on our Workspace security page.

Big files, desktops and working offline

A single file in Drive can be up to 5 TB, so the file size limit is almost never what stops you. The pool is. If a video producer in Kathmandu is uploading raw footage, the question is not whether Drive accepts the file but whether the organisation has bought enough pooled storage to hold a month of it.

Drive also has a desktop application that puts your Drive and your Shared Drives into Finder or File Explorer, so you can open files in normal desktop software instead of a browser, and Docs, Sheets and Slides can be made available offline in Chrome. Both are useful in Nepal for the obvious reason: connections drop, and work that only exists in a browser tab drops with them.

When somebody leaves, transfer before you delete

This is the most expensive mistake we see, and it is entirely avoidable.

1. Transfer the data first. Before deleting a user, transfer their Drive and Calendar data to a colleague from the Admin console. Anything in a Shared Drive is already safe because the organisation owns it.
2. Then remove access. Sign the person out, reset the password, and remove them from groups.
3. Know the 20-day window. After a user is deleted, Google keeps the data available for restoring for 20 days. After that it cannot be recovered, by you or by Google.
4. Handle the licence. On a flexible plan the charge stops with the user. On an annual plan the licence remains and can be reassigned to the next person.

Our help article on offboarding employees has the full checklist, including forwarding and alias handling.

Team storage and personal storage are not the same thing

People sometimes ask whether they can solve a company storage problem with a personal Google plan. They cannot, because the two live on different accounts. A Google AI Pro subscription adds storage to one personal Google Account, shared across that person's Gmail, Drive and Photos. Workspace storage is pooled across your organisation's accounts on your own domain, and is administered by you. If you want the personal version for an individual, read our guide to Google AI Pro storage; for a team, the edition table above is the right place to start.

WebsNP supplies all three Business editions in Nepali rupees, starting at $2.78 per user per month for Business Starter, with the accounts managed in your own Google Admin console. The full comparison sits on our Workspace price page.