Reference
Shared drive vs My Drive in Google Workspace
A shared drive is owned by the organisation and survives the departure of every member, while a My Drive file is owned by one user and is deleted with that account. A single shared drive holds a maximum of 500,000 items including folders.
| Ownership | Shared drive: the organisation. My Drive: the individual user |
|---|---|
| Leaver behaviour | Shared drive files survive; My Drive files go when the account is deleted |
| Item cap | 500,000 items per shared drive, folders included |
| Nesting | 20 levels of subfolders inside a shared drive |
| Membership | 600 direct members and groups per shared drive |
The leaver test that settles most arguments
Ask what happens to the file when the person who created it leaves. If the answer matters to anyone but that person, the file belongs in a shared drive. If the file is genuinely personal working material, My Drive is correct.
Ownership transfer on offboarding exists precisely because this rule is ignored. Transferring a leaver's My Drive is a rescue operation, not a filing system, and it silently changes the sharing links other people rely on.
Where the item cap bites
The 500,000 item cap counts folders, not just files, so deep folder structures imported from a file server hit it far earlier than the file count suggests. Splitting by department or year is the usual remedy.
Migrations from Windows file shares are where this appears first. We size shared drives during discovery rather than during cutover, because a drive that hits the cap mid-copy fails partway with items scattered across two locations.
What we see that others don't say
In file server migrations we run, folder objects typically make up between a fifth and a third of the item count, which is why the 500,000 cap is usually reached long before anyone expects it.
What this doesn't cover
- Item and membership caps are Google platform limits and cannot be raised on request.
- Shared drives are not a backup: deleting an item deletes it for every member.
Questions we get asked
- Do shared drive files count against a user's storage?
- No. Shared drive content counts against the pooled tenant storage, not an individual user's allocation, which is one reason moving team content out of My Drive changes storage reporting.
- Can a shared drive file be owned by an external user?
- No. External members can be given access up to manager level where policy allows, but ownership stays with the organisation that owns the shared drive.
How this page is verified
Reviewed by Pearl Lemon Cloud migrations desk, Google Workspace migration engineers. Last checked .
- Caps verified against Google's shared drive limits documentation at the review date.
- Folder-to-file ratios drawn from discovery scans on file server migrations we have run.
Sources you can check
Related pages
Sizing shared drives before a file server migration?
Discovery counts your items and folders per proposed drive, tells you where the cap will be hit, and returns a split that survives the copy.