How to Find the “Storage Hog” in a Shared Drive

When a Shared Drive consumes excessive storage, finding the specific files or folders eating up your capacity can be frustrating. In standard “My Drive” storage, every file has an individual owner whose usage is easily tracked. In a Shared Drive, however, the files belong collectively to the drive itself, and all stored data counts directly against your organization’s pooled quota.

Quick Answer

To locate storage hogs across your domain, open the Google Admin Console and go to Storage > Shared drives to sort drives by total space. To identify large files inside a specific Shared Drive, use the Drive search bar with parent:[FolderID] combined with the size:>100M parameter, or run a GAM script audit.

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Why Locating Heavy Data in Shared Drives Is Challenging

Shared Drives introduce two tracking hurdles:

1. No Individual Owner: You cannot filter files by owner:username because the Shared Drive is the owner.
2. No Native Folder Size Display: The Google Drive web interface displays file sizes, but it leaves the “Size” column blank for folders. If a Shared Drive contains a nested hierarchy of ten subfolders, the web UI does not show which branch holds 400 GB and which holds 2 MB.

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Method 1: Identify the Heaviest Shared Drives (Admin Console)

If you are a Google Workspace administrator seeking to find which Shared Drives in the domain are consuming the most capacity:

1. Open the Google Admin Console.
2. Go to Storage.
3. Click View all Shared drives (or navigate to Apps > Google Workspace > Drive and Docs > Manage shared drives).
4. Click the Storage used column header to sort the list from highest to lowest.
5. Take note of any drives using an unexpectedly large footprint.

If you notice drives running into file-count restrictions alongside high volume, review Resolving “Item limit reached” in Google Shared Drives.

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Method 2: Target Large Files Inside the Shared Drive Web Interface

If you have Manager or Content Manager access to a specific Shared Drive, you can expose large files using targeted search queries:

Option A: The Global Size Filter

Click into the Google Drive search bar at the top of the screen and enter:

size:>500M

This forces Drive to display all files larger than 500 MB across all locations you have access to. To restrict the search to only the problematic Shared Drive:

1. Open the Shared Drive.
2. Click the Search options icon on the right side of the search bar.
3. Under Location, select the specific Shared Drive name.
4. Set File size to “Custom” and input > 100 MB (or larger).
5. Click Search.

Option B: Target Specific File Formats

The most common storage hogs inside Shared Drives fall into four categories:

• Video files: type:video (e.g., recorded meetings, uncompressed event footage).
• Disk images & installers: type:archive or .iso / .zip / .tar.
• Database backups: Search .sql, .bak, or .dump.
• Design files: Search .psd, .ai, or .raw.

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Method 3: Deep Folder Tree Auditing Using GAM

When a Shared Drive has hundreds of subdirectories, hunting through the web UI is inefficient. Workspace administrators can use GAM (Google Apps Manager) to generate an exact CSV inventory of every file, its path, and its size.

Run the following command in your GAM CLI terminal:

gam redirect csv ./SharedDriveAudit.csv user admin@yourdomain.com print filelist select <SharedDriveID> fields id,title,mimeType,size,parents

Open the generated SharedDriveAudit.csv in Google Sheets or Excel:

1. Sort the size column from largest to smallest.
2. Convert bytes to gigabytes (=size/1024/1024/1024) to quickly see your largest items.
3. Review the top 50 files. You will typically find that less than 5% of the files account for over 80% of the drive’s total consumption.

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Check the Shared Drive Trash Bin

A common source of invisible storage consumption in Shared Drives is the internal Trash bin. When a member deletes a file from a Shared Drive, the file is hidden from the main folder tree, but it is not permanently removed until 30 days have elapsed.

If a team recently deleted hundreds of gigabytes of obsolete data, that data continues to count against your organization’s storage pool until the trash is emptied.

1. Open the target Shared Drive.
2. Under the Shared Drive title menu, select Trash.
3. If you hold Manager rights, you can click Empty trash in the top right banner to immediately reclaim the space.

For issues involving deleted files that linger in storage reporting, see Why Drive Trash is still counting against your quota.