What is a shared file, and why shared means five different things

    Cameron James·
    · 7 min read
    Document sharingFile sharingSmall business

    A shared file is a file more than one person can get to, without you emailing them a copy of it. That's the whole definition. One file, one location, several people with permission to open it.

    The reason the term causes so much confusion is that "shared" covers at least five genuinely different arrangements, with different rules about who owns the thing and what happens when someone leaves. Most of the file chaos I've watched inside small companies comes from two people using the word to mean different things and neither of them noticing.

    Sharing a file means five different things

    You sent a copy

    The oldest arrangement, and the one people still default to. You attach a file to an email and hit send. There are now two files. Yours changes, theirs doesn't, and within a fortnight nobody knows which is current.

    Technically this isn't a shared file at all, it's a duplicated one, but it's what most people picture when they say they shared something. It's also why version numbers in filenames exist, and why "proposal_final_v3_FINAL.pdf" is a genre.

    You shared a folder

    Same mechanism, wider blast radius. Everything you drop into that folder is automatically shared with the same people, including the thing you dropped in without thinking on a Friday afternoon.

    Folder sharing is where accidental disclosure actually happens in small businesses. Not hacking. Somebody saving a payroll spreadsheet into a folder that six contractors can read.

    The file lives in a shared drive

    A shared drive (Google's Shared Drives, SharePoint document libraries, a Dropbox team space) is owned by the organisation rather than by a person. Files in it belong to the company. When someone leaves and their account is deleted, the files stay.

    If you employ anyone, this is the arrangement you want for anything the business depends on.

    The file is a live collaborative document

    A Google Doc, a Notion page, a Figma file. Several people can be inside it at the same time and the file is really a stream of changes rather than a static object. "Shared" here means co-authored, not just readable.

    Useful for working things out together. Not what you want when you're sending a finished thing to a client, because it invites editing and it shows them your comment history if you haven't cleaned it up.

    The difference matters most when someone leaves

    If your business documents are shared links from an individual's personal cloud account, then that person is a single point of failure. They leave, the account gets closed, and every link anyone ever saved breaks at once. Contracts, brand assets, the pricing sheet that three people bookmarked. Nobody has to do anything wrong for this to happen. Somebody just resigns, IT closes the account on schedule, and a year of client work goes with it.

    The fix costs nothing. Put anything the company relies on in a drive the company owns, not in a folder owned by a person. Ten minutes of moving files now beats a fortnight of archaeology later.

    Permissions are the actual product

    When you share a file, you're setting two things: who can reach it, and what they can do with it. Almost everyone gets the second one right and the first one wrong.

    "Anyone with the link" is the setting that causes real problems, because links get forwarded, pasted into Slack channels and saved in browser histories. It is genuinely convenient and it's fine for a menu or a public brochure. It is not fine for anything with a price, a name or a number in it.

    "Specific people" costs you one extra step and removes almost all of the risk. If you take one habit from this post, take that one. I've written more on this in the best way to share files with external users, which goes deeper on the client-facing side.

    When a shared file isn't the right answer

    Shared files are built for people who already work together. They have accounts, they know what they're looking at, and nobody has to explain the document to them.

    Sending a document to someone outside your company is a different job wearing the same clothes. They don't have an account and shouldn't need one. They'll open the thing once, alone, probably on a phone, with nobody there to tell them which bit matters. And you'll have no idea whether they read past the first page.

    That gap is what we built LiveDocument for, so read this paragraph knowing I'm not neutral about it. You record a short video walking through the document, it sits next to your PDF or image behind a single link, and you can see which pages they actually spent time on. Clickable highlights jump the video to the section they're reading. It isn't storage and it isn't a shared drive, so it won't replace Google Drive for your internal files. It's for the moment a document leaves the building and you want it to land.

    For everything internal, a shared drive and sensible permissions is the correct answer and always has been. If you want the mechanics of turning a document into a link people can open, file to URL covers it step by step.

    Common questions about shared files

    What are shared files in simple terms?

    Files that live in one place and can be opened by more than one person, using permissions rather than copies. Instead of emailing five people the same document, you keep one document and give five people access.

    What's the difference between a shared file and a shared folder?

    A shared file grants access to one item. A shared folder grants access to everything inside it, now and in the future. Folders save time and are the more common cause of accidental oversharing, so it's worth checking what's in one before you share it.

    Who owns a shared file?

    Whoever's account it lives in. That's usually a person, which becomes a problem when they leave. Files stored in an organisation-owned shared drive belong to the company instead, and survive individual accounts being closed.

    Can I stop sharing a file after I've shared it?

    Yes, in any cloud storage tool. Remove the person's access or disable the link, and it stops working immediately, including for anyone they forwarded it to. Doing this occasionally as a tidy-up is a genuinely good habit, because most people never revoke anything.

    Is a shared file the same as a shared drive?

    No. A shared file is one item you've granted access to. A shared drive is a storage space owned by an organisation where everything inside it is shared by default. Same word, very different consequences when someone leaves.

    Shared files handle the inside of your business fine. It's the documents you send outside it that go quiet, which is the bit I got tired of guessing about and ended up building livedocument.com to fix.

    About the Author

    Cameron James

    Cameron is the founder of LiveDocument. He writes about sharing documents, PDFs, decks and contracts, and why pairing a video walkthrough with a document beats sending it cold.