Shared Drives vs My Drive in Google Workspace: Organizing Files for a Nepali Team

Every Google Workspace account includes both My Drive, personal storage tied to an individual user, and Shared Drives, storage owned by the organization rather than any one person. Most small Nepali teams default to My Drive for everything, mainly because it's the first thing you see and nobody explains the alternative during setup. That default quietly creates a real business risk: company files that legally belong to the business end up structurally tied to whichever employee happened to create them.

The Core Difference: Who Actually Owns the Files

A file in My Drive is owned by the individual user who created it, even if it's shared with the whole team. If that person leaves the company, their files leave with the account unless someone actively transfers ownership before the account is removed — a step covered in more detail in our offboarding guide, and one that gets missed constantly. A file in a Shared Drive, by contrast, is owned by the Shared Drive itself, not by any individual member. Staff can join, leave, or change roles, and the files stay exactly where they are, with permissions managed at the team level rather than tied to a person.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds

Picture a common scenario: an accountant at a Nepali trading company keeps three years of financial working files in their personal My Drive because that's simply where Google Drive put them by default. The day they resign, unless someone remembers to transfer ownership during offboarding, those files are one deletion away from being gone, and even before that point, nobody else can properly manage sharing on them without going through that one person. Put the same files in a Shared Drive from the start, and none of that risk exists — the finance team retains full access regardless of who's currently working there.

What to Put Where

• Shared Drives: anything that belongs to the business rather than an individual — client contracts, financial records, HR documents, marketing assets, project files for ongoing client work, company policies and templates.
• My Drive: genuinely personal working files — a draft someone is still developing before sharing it, personal notes, or work-in-progress that isn't yet ready for team visibility. Once something becomes a team deliverable, it should move to a Shared Drive.

Setting Up Shared Drives Properly

Rather than one giant Shared Drive for the whole company, most Nepali businesses do better with a small number of purpose-built Shared Drives: one per department (Finance, HR, Marketing) or one per major client account for an agency. This keeps permissions manageable — the finance Shared Drive can be restricted to finance staff and leadership, while a marketing Shared Drive stays open to the wider team, without needing to manage permissions file-by-file.

Permission Levels Worth Understanding

• Manager: can add or remove members and change permissions — reserve this for department heads, not the whole team.
• Content manager: can add, edit, move and delete files, suitable for most regular team members doing daily work.
• Contributor: can add and edit but not reorganize or delete existing structure, useful for junior staff or external contractors with limited access needs.
• Viewer / Commenter: read-only or comment-only, appropriate for stakeholders who need visibility without edit rights.

A Real Migration Example

An accounting firm in Kathmandu had every client's working files scattered across individual accountants' My Drive folders, shared ad-hoc with colleagues as needed. When a senior accountant left mid-project, two active client engagements briefly had no clear file owner, and the remaining team spent a stressful week piecing together access to files that had only ever lived in one person's Drive. We restructured their entire file system into Shared Drives organized by client, with content manager permissions for the assigned team and viewer access for partners. The next staff departure, a few months later, caused zero disruption to any client file.

Making the Switch

Moving from a My-Drive-default structure to properly organized Shared Drives is mostly a one-time reorganization effort, not an ongoing burden once it's set up correctly. WebsNP includes this kind of Drive structuring as part of Google Workspace setup for Nepali business clients, so company files are protected from staff turnover by design rather than by luck. If your team's files are currently scattered across individual My Drive accounts, message us on WhatsApp and we can help you restructure it properly.