How do you hide a Shared Drive in Google Drive?
Shared Drives in Google Drive are fantastic for sorting and organising your business files, ensuring only the right team members have access to the files they need, and making it easy for your business to take a big step towards data compliance and regulatory requirements with minimal effort. Please read our blog post on the best ways to organise your company's data in Google Drive.
At some point, files and data become outdated and irrelevant, but you might not want to delete them; maybe they have some sentimental value, you are contracted to keep them for a period, or regulations state you need to keep hold of them for a set number of years before you then delete it. This can all add up to an extensive collection of Shared Drives that are no longer used.
A hidden setting in Google Drive lets you hide Shared Drives from view on the web version of Google Drive and Drive for Desktop on your computer.
How to retire a Shared Drive:
As we discussed, every Shared Drive has an expiration date when the data contained within is no longer relevant to your business. It could be old project data, files about an ex-client, or something else, but you will need to retire a Shared Drive at some point.
If you want to retire but retain the data, you need Manager permissions for the Shared Drive. If you have this level of access, all you need to do is open the Shared Drive and remove the other members. The Shared Drive will then vanish from these other members' Google Drive. If you want them to be able to see the Shared Drive and its contents but not edit or add files to the Shared Drive, change their access to View Only.
You have now essentially retired this Shared Drive; only you remain with full access to it. For the others, the drive vanished when you removed their access or became restricted if you gave them View-only permissions.
How to hide and unhide a Shared Drive:
It is important to note that when you hide a Shared Drive, it is only hidden from your Shared Drive list in Google Drive; it is not hidden from anyone else with access to that Shared Drive.
This setting is individualistic. While you may wish to conceal a Shared Drive, someone else with access to it may not want to hide it, so the setting you choose does not apply to other collaborators of the Shared Drive. However, as you read in the previous section, if you have Manager permissions to the Shared Drive, you could remove the other collaborators' access to the Shared Drive, making it also disappear from their Google Drive.
If you are the manager of a Shared Drive, follow the previous section in this blog post about retiring a Shared Drive before hiding it. With the Shared Drive hidden, you're likely to forget it exists; therefore, it is important that you set it so collaborators can't make changes to the data contained within it.
To hide a Shared Drive, go to Google Drive on the web and click on the Shared Drive section. Find the Shared Drive you wish to hide from view, right-click on it, and select Hide Shared Drive. To regain access to a hidden Shared Drive, in the top right of the Shared Drive area of Google Drive, click Hidden Shared Drives; you will then see all the Shared Drives you have chosen to hide. If you right-click on one of these hidden Shared Drives, you can Unhide, and the Shared Drive will return to the main Shared Drive view in your Google Drive.
