Group folders vs. folder shares. What's the difference?

Hi,

Iā€™m wondering what the difference is between Group Folders and Folders shared to groups of users.

Cheers.

I guess the difference is the user who is responsible for the share.

Folders shared to groups by user -> One user shared his folder to a group, if that user does not exist anymore, the share is gone. Also if that user deletes it by any means (Malware, wrong clickā€¦) itā€™s gone for everyone as well. But can be done by the user itself.

Group Folder - Handled by the server to provide a folder to one group by admin setting. Con: can be done only by admin, but more protection.

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+1 @Sibul

For a long time admins would create dummy users to act as a service account for shares not tied to one user (who could stop sharing whenever).

Today admins can configure these shares on the server directly and not work around it.

Users are still free to share with each other but a folder here and there is not the same use case as for example a team shared folder for resources

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Thanks all for the clarification.

I use a dummy user too. Just wondering, are there any plans to programme a script that migrates those folders to the new group setup?

Cheers.

another advantage of groupfolders is as well the shared storage space for the entire group where users are no longer accounted for the limited space that they have as the group has its own space allocation.
Example: user has 2GB max; and is at its 1.8GB space allocation but in the groupshare he can upload files that are still like 500MB in size.

Now that with 12.0.2 the file-revisions seems to be back (it was broken); is the trashcan functionality working now again as well or did somebody not tried that yet?

@JasonBayton What about groupfolder synchronization from a windows client?
I have a ā€˜tempā€™ groupfolder name. I noticed that in the initial device client for windows the groupshare is listed by name until I click on the button to customize the list of downloaded folders. Then suddenly I see that my temp groupfolder is by default disabled (aka not downloaded). I tested it then with another user account by just accepting all folders without change and then even my groupfolder was not offline made available. Is this by design or something that needs to be changed?

Probably not officially, though the community might step up on that.

Honestly not sure, might be a @tflidd question or even a topic of its own.

@JK74 Can you give more details how you set up the group share? Via admin user? On external storage? Read-only? Just a few steps that we can try to reproduce this problem on a different system.

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@tflidd I did set it up as admin on the local storage and the share is read-write to certain groups.
see screenshots here as I made a new topic for this discussion per the request from Jason

Blockquote[quote=ā€œJasonBayton, post:3, topic:19207ā€]
Today admins can configure these shares on the server directly and not work around it.
[/quote]

Do you mean by using the groupfolders app? Sorry to revive an old thread, Iā€™d just like to clarify.

Yes.

Disadvantages Iā€™ve noticed with group folders.

  1. Deleted files cannot be restored
  2. Changes are not reported at apps/activity

Cheers.

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I just argued for a comparison list - maybe interesting for you?!

One conā€™s, command maps:scan-photos ignore the group folders