Shared drives

A shared drive belongs to a group instead of a person. Everyone on it opens the same tree, uploads into the same folders, and sees the same trash — unlike sharing, where an item stays in its owner's drive and other people are given a door to it.

Use one for a team's files, a project, or anything that should outlive whoever happened to upload it.

Full mode only. Simple mode already serves one drive to everybody, so a second sharing model on top of it would mean nothing — the page and the sidebar group are hidden there.

#Creating one

Any signed-in user can create a drive: Shared drives → All drives in the sidebar, then New shared drive. The creator owns it, and owning it means managing it.

Each drive then appears in the sidebar under its own name, and browses exactly like My Drive: upload, folders, rename, move, preview, notes, documents. The sidebar lists the first five alphabetically and a N more link to the rest; the drive you have open is always listed. The management page lives at /drives/shared.

Search is not limited to the page you are on: from any drive it looks through your own drive, every shared drive you are a member of and every mounted volume, and each result names where it is. Opening one takes you there: a folder opens, a file opens in its own folder with its preview showing. GET /api/v1/search?q= answers the same list to API clients.

#Roles

Members are added by name or email, the same search the Share dialog uses, and each is given one role:

The owner is a manager who cannot be removed, and is the only person who can delete the drive. Adding someone who is already a member changes their role rather than granting a second one, and anyone may remove themselves from a drive they no longer want to see.

A public link to something on a drive lists under My links of the manager who made it, and stops working once they are no longer a manager of that drive.

New members are notified the way a share is; a role change is not news, so it is silent.

#Moving files in and out

Move and Copy to… in a file's or folder's menu (and the selection bar) offer every place you can write to: My Drive, each shared drive where you are not a viewer, and every writable mounted volume. A folder travels with everything under it; its trashed contents stay behind.

A move between two places is a copy followed by deleting the original, and the original is only deleted once every file has arrived — a partial failure leaves both copies rather than losing anything. Moving out of a drive needs write access to it, and nothing can be moved out of a read-only volume (copying out is fine).

#The trash

Each drive has its own trash, reached from the Trash button on the drive header. Trashing in a shared drive puts the item there, not in the personal trash of whoever pressed delete — so anybody with write access can restore it.

#Where the files live

Under STORAGE_PATH/drives/<drive-id>, one directory per drive, alongside the per-user directories. Nothing is copied when a drive is created: it starts empty.

Rows in files and folders carry volume_id = drive:<id>, the same column mounted volumes use, and are owned by the drive's creator. Two consequences worth knowing:

• Deleting the creator's account deletes the drive and its files with it.
• A drive's bytes count towards the creator's storage usage, not the member's who uploaded them.

Activity rows name the person who actually did the thing, not the drive's owner.

#People who only see drives

An account can be drives only: no drive of its own, only the shared drives it is a member of. It is how you give a client, a band member or a contractor a simple mode-like view of one drive while you keep every feature. Tick Shared drives only when inviting them in Admin → Users, or switch an existing account from its row menu, then add them to a drive from Members.

Such an account signs in straight to its drive (or to All drives when it is on several). It has no My Drive, Recent, Starred, trash of its own, shared links, shared-with-me items, categories, mounted volumes or storage page, and it cannot create drives. Its role in each drive is whatever you give it: viewer, editor or manager. The server enforces this, not only the menus: the API, WebDAV and the desktop app offer it its drives and nothing else.

Switching an account to drives only hides its own drive without deleting it; switching it back shows it again. Simple mode ignores the setting, since everyone already shares one drive there.

#Deleting a drive

All drives → ⋯ → Delete drive, owner only. It deletes the drive's files for everybody and cannot be undone.

#Through the API

Drives are managed under /api/v1/drives:

Copying or moving between places is POST /api/v1/storage/transfer: the query names where the items are, the body names the destination (drive, volume or neither, plus a folder) and a mode of copy or move.

Their contents are not a separate API. Every /api/v1/storage/** endpoint takes an optional drive query parameter, and with it acts on that drive instead of your own:

GET /api/v1/storage/list?drive=<drive-id>
POST /api/v1/storage/folder?drive=<drive-id>

Membership is checked before the handler runs: a drive you are not on answers 404 (a guessed id must not reveal that it exists), and a write as a viewer answers 403.