Shared, shared drive from another organization

[b_gorsky1]

The other day I decided to setup and test Synology's Active Backup for Google Workspace. It allows you to back up user account data (email, calendar, etc.) and/or shared drives to a Synology NAS.

I decided to test by backing up one of our shared drives. When the backup completed, to my surprise, I saw a shared drive listed that I was not familiar with nor was it in our list of shared drives. It caught my attention because it had 180 GB of data. I was able to drill down through the contents of this shared drive and was subsequently able to determine that it was actually a shared drive owned by another organization that had been shared with one of our users. He appears to be the only one that can see it in the Shared Drives. 

I have a bunch of questions/concerns:

1. Why is it showing up in Shared Drives? It isn't owned by our organization. Should it be in that users 'Shared with me' folder?
2. Why as an administrator, can I not see it if it is there?
3. Clearly this Active Backup application is using a Google API to access the data but since I could not see the shared drive I did not select it to back up, in the Synology log, it says it was "Auto discovered." Is this some sort of bug with the API?

I'm really confused and concerned. Anyone have any insight as to what is going on? I'm contemplating opening a ticket with Google. I have already done so with Synology but haven't heard back yet.

[icrew · Accepted solution]

Hi @b_gorsky1 :

Shared Drives from other organizations do appear in a user's "Shared Drives" section of Google Drive--that's entirely normal. Conceptually, Shared Drives are owned by the entire team that has access to them, not a single user, so it makes sense (to me at least!) that it'd appear in that section, and be picked up by backup tools.

Hope that helps, at least a little,

Ian

[b_gorsky1]

Interesting @icrew  I was not aware that shared Shared Drives appear in a users Shared Drive.  I thought only the organizations Shared Drives were housed there. However, as a Super Admin, I feel like we should have some visibility to that somewhere. I discovered this purely be accident. It is a little unsettling.