Starting Monday, October 9, UNCG faculty, staff, and students will be able to take advantage of Team Drives and Drive File Stream, two enhancements to Google’s cloud-based file storage and sharing service: Google Drive.

Team Drive

Google Team Drives are additional shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device. Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive are owned by the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave UNCG, the files stay exactly where they are so the team can continue to share information and get work done.

Team Drives are particularly beneficial for sharing information in teams that have periodic membership changes (like committees, projects, working groups, etc.), as well as for storing information associated with a particular role (manager, director, administrator, etc.)

Teams Drives are accessible within your Google Drive space, and have access rights similar to my Drive files, including the ability to allow non-Google account owners to have limited access.

For more information, see About Team Drive.

Drive File Stream

Google is improving users’ ability to access Google Drive contents from the desktop with two new applications: Drive File Stream for Enterprise and Backup & Sync (for Consumers, that is gmail.com accounts). These two applications replace Google Drive Sync, which will no longer be supported after December 11, 2017.

Drive File Stream enables access to your Google Drive files via a mapped drive on your machine. With Drive File Stream, you stream your Drive files directly from the cloud to your Mac or PC, freeing up disk space and network bandwidth. Because Drive files are stored in the cloud, any changes you or your collaborators make are automatically updated everywhere. You’ll always have the latest version. You can also make Drive files available for offline access. These cached files sync back to the cloud when you’re online, so the latest version is available on all your devices. In contrast, Backup and Sync is a periodic syncing application.

UNCG users are encouraged to make use of Google’s Enterprise capabilities by using Drive File Stream. However, Backup and Sync is also available for use with iSpartan accounts. While Drive File Stream and Backup and Sync can co-exist, Google will prompt the user to exclude File Stream from syncing processes.

Users of Google Drive Sync will be prompted to upgrade to FileStream or Backup and Sync.

For more information, see G Suite Updates: Drive File Stream launching to all G Suite customers.