Files and folders

Files is your organization's shared storage: bylaws, grant paperwork, printed materials, photos from a canvass, anything your staff needs in one place rather than in somebody's personal drive. Open Files in the Operations section of your workspace sidebar.

This is a staff tool, and it is worth knowing where the line falls before you point people at it. Owners and admins can use Files end to end. Anyone else needs it granted through a custom role, and the file permissions are separate, so you can give someone the ability to look without the ability to change anything:

• View files is what opens Files at all. On its own it is read-only: browse, open, download, and look in Trash.
• Upload files and create folders adds uploading, new folders, renaming and moving.
• Delete files and folders adds moving things to Trash, and restoring or permanently deleting from it.
• Share files and Full control appear in the same list. Restricting a folder and editing who can see it stays with owners and admins.

Anyone without at least View files will find the page unavailable, even though the sidebar shows the item. Buttons you have not been given simply do not appear. There is no member-facing or public file surface at all -- nothing in Files is visible outside your staff.

Browsing

Files opens at the top level of your organization's storage. You get a table with Name, Size, Modified and Owner; folders sort above files, and both are listed alphabetically. Owner is whoever added the item.

Click a folder to go into it. The page title doubles as your breadcrumb trail, with Files as the root, so you can jump back up a level at any point. An empty folder says so and offers an upload button.

Uploading

Two ways, and they do the same thing:

• Click Upload in the header and pick one or more files.
• Drag files from your desktop straight onto the list.

Either way the files land in the folder you are currently looking at. An Uploads tray appears in the bottom corner with one row per file and a progress bar, marks each one done as it finishes, and shows an error on the row if one fails. Clear removes the finished rows. The list refreshes itself as uploads complete.

Large files are handled for you -- uploads are sent in pieces behind the scenes, so a big video or a scanned archive works the same as a small PDF. There is no per-file size limit and no restriction on file type; the only ceiling is your organization's total storage.

Folders, renaming and moving

New folder creates a folder inside whatever folder you are viewing. You can nest as deeply as you like.

Every row has a ... menu on hover, holding whatever you have permission to do. At full access, a file offers Open, Download, Rename, Move and Delete, and a folder offers Manage access, Rename, Move and Delete.

Move opens the full folder tree with Home at the top for the root. Pick a destination and choose Move here. You cannot move a folder into itself or into one of its own subfolders -- those destinations are shown but cannot be selected.

If something already has the name you are giving it, nothing is overwritten and nothing fails. The new item gets a numbered suffix instead. That applies when you create, rename, move, or restore.

Opening and downloading

Open shows the file in a new tab; Download saves it with its original name. Both work through a short-lived private link generated for you at the moment you click, which is why there is no way to copy a file's address and send it to someone. Sharing a file with a person outside your staff means sending them the file itself.

Restricting a folder

By default every folder is open to the staff who can use Files. Restricting is how you narrow that.

Open a folder's ... menu and choose Manage access, then turn on Restricted. From that moment the folder and everything inside it is hidden from everyone except owners and admins, until you grant access. Grant it by clicking a workspace group or an individual, and remove a grant with the cross beside it. Restricted folders show a small lock in the file list.

Restriction is inherited. A subfolder of a restricted folder is governed by that ancestor and says which folder it inherits from. If you want that subfolder to have its own rules instead, turn on Restricted on the subfolder itself to override what it inherits.

Access is set per folder. There is no way to restrict a single file -- put it in a folder and restrict that.

Trash and getting things back

Delete on a file or folder moves it to Trash. It disappears from the browser immediately, and deleting a folder takes everything inside it along in one piece.

The trash-can icon in the Files header opens Trash, where deleted items are recoverable for 30 days. Each row shows what was deleted, how many items it contained, its size, and how many days are left.

• Restore puts it back where it came from. If the folder it used to live in has since been deleted too, it is restored to the nearest surviving folder above it, or to Home.
• Delete on a trash row removes it permanently and frees the storage straight away. That one really cannot be undone.
• Empty trash does the same for everything at once.

Anything still in Trash after 30 days is removed automatically.

Storage

The Files header shows how much storage you have used against your limit, with a bar that turns amber as you approach it. Limits go with your plan:

An upload that would push you over the limit is refused before anything is sent, and the tray tells you the quota was exceeded. Permanently deleting from Trash is what frees space -- moving something to Trash does not.

The hard-drive icon beside the meter opens Storage by member, a breakdown of how much each person has uploaded, largest first. It is useful for finding the one folder of raw video that is eating a quarter of your allowance. Everyone who can open Files can see it.

Why this matters

Shared documents have a way of ending up in one staffer's personal cloud drive, where they quietly become inaccessible the day that person moves on. Keeping them here means the organization owns them, not an individual. The two things worth setting up deliberately are folder restriction -- because folders are open to your file-using staff unless you say otherwise, and it inherits downward, so restricting one folder near the top covers everything under it -- and a habit of emptying Trash when you are genuinely done, since that is the only thing that gives you your storage back.