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After you share a file, you can stop sharing at any time. You can also control if people you've shared with can change or share your file.
Tips:
- When you update permissions for an item in My Drive, you may be prompted to manage permissions for the folder it's in. This happens if you try to give someone less access to the item than they inherit from the parent folder.
- This ensures consistent access across the entire folder.
Stop sharing a file
Important:
- If you share a file with people, the owner and anyone with edit access can change sharing permissions and share the file.
- If you don’t want anyone to publicly access your file, stop publishing the file.
- If you remove or reduce access for a person who has access to the item’s folder, the permission is either removed or changed for the entire folder.
- On your computer, find the file or folder in Google Drive.
- To find out If a file or folder is shared:
- Right click the file or folder.
- On the right side of file, click More
.
- Click File Information
Details.
- A panel opens and shows who owns and has access to the file.
- If you have permission to make changes, click Manage access.
- Find the file or folder in:
- Open or select the file or folder.
- Click Share or Share
.
- Find the person you want to stop sharing with.
- To the right of their name, click the Down arrow
- Click Save.
When you change an item's general access to Restricted, only people with access can open the file. This overrides inherited parent folder permissions.
- Find the file or folder in Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, or Google Slides.
- Open or select the file or folder.
- Click Share
.
- Under “General access”, click the Down arrow
.
- Select Restricted.
- Click Done.
If you delete a shared file that you own:
- People that can view, comment, or edit can make a copy of the file until you permanently delete it.
- To permanently delete the file, click the file in your trash, and click Delete forever
. Learn more about deleting files.
If you delete a shared file that you don’t own:
- The file will be removed from your Drive , but other collaborators can still access it.
- To get the file back, open a link to the file
File
Limit how your files are shared
Prevent people from downloading, printing, or copying your fileIf you own a file, you can take steps so that users can’t print, copy, or download it:
- Find the file or folder in:
- Select one or more files you want to limit.
- Click Share or Share
- At the top right, click Settings
.
- Under “People who can download, copy, and print,” check the boxes that correspond to which user role(s) you want to allow.
If “Editors” are specified, the copy and paste behavior for the selected documents changes to the following:
- Users can copy and paste document content within the document.
- Users can copy and paste outside content into the document.
- Users can’t copy and paste document content outside the document.
To prevent file owners from downloading, copying, and printing, administrators can create a DLP rule for Drive.
Tip: You can limit how people share, print, download, and copy within Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. However, you can't stop how others share the file content in other ways.
As the owner of the file, you can remove Editors’ ability to change permissions or share the file.
- Open the file in:
- Click Share.
- At the top, click Settings
- Uncheck Editors can change permissions and share.
- Click Done.
Important:
Files and folders within a shared folder always inherit its permissions. This ensures consistent and predictable access across all of your content.
- The folder's permissions control the access for everything it contains.
- If you uncheck "Editors can change permissions and share" on a specific file, permission changes made to the parent folder still apply to that file. The parent folder's permissions are the primary source of truth for access.
- Example scenario:
- You have a file set to "Prevent editors from sharing" inside a folder. You then make someone an Editor of the entire folder. If that Editor shares the whole folder with a new person, that new person will get access to the file.
- This happens because the file's setting only stops someone from sharing the file directly, but it doesn't stop them from sharing the folder it's in.
- Example scenario:
More options with Google Accounts through work or school
Give someone permissions to a file for a limited timeSet an expiration date for a file
- Open a file in Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, or Google Slides.
- Click Share
find the user you'd like to give temporary permissions to.
- If you haven't shared the file with that person yet, add the user's email and click Send or Share. At the top right of the document, click Share again.
- Next to the person's name, click the Down arrow
- Next to "Access expires," click a date to set as the expiration date. Choose a date within one year of the current date.
- Click Save.
Change share settings for Google Forms
Google Forms often have different sharing options than other kinds of files.
