Cloud & Infrastructure · Google
Shared Drive vs. My Drive
Also known as: Shared Drive, My Drive, Google Shared Drive
Google Workspace storage split by ownership — My Drive is personal, Shared Drives are team-owned. (Microsoft equivalents: OneDrive and SharePoint.)
In Google Workspace, My Drive is your personal work storage — files you own and manage individually. Shared Drives are organization-owned storage where a team or department owns the content, not any individual. (The Microsoft equivalents are OneDrive for personal and SharePoint for team storage.)
The distinction matters most when people leave. Files in someone's My Drive are tied to that person — when they depart, access management gets complicated and the organization can find itself locked out of its own content. Files in a Shared Drive belong to the organization; membership changes don't affect ownership.
Default to Shared Drives for anything that belongs to the team — project files, client work, shared documents. Reserve My Drive for genuinely personal working files.