Sharing Subfolders while retaining folderstructure

ℹ️ Support
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1

I know this topic has come up a number of times, but I think I have a different usecase than others descibed it and I’m wandering around forum threads and my own tests for hours now and can’t seem understand or archive the following:

In my usecase, lets say we have the following folder structure:

- Folder A
|-- Subfolder B
  |-- Subsubfolder D
|-- Subfolder C
|-- File in Folder A

I want to archieve the following:

  • Group “Production” needs some Files from Subsubfolder D, but must not see (or at least have access to) File in Folder A
  • The folder Structure shall be retained, so that Production also sees Folder A / Subfolder B / Subsubfolder D
  • If a File or Folder is added within Folder A, Group production must not have automatic access to it.

This could be the usecase when, for instance Folder A is the working folder of a Department who need to share some information at multiple points of the file tree (e.g. for each project). Instead of creating the same folder structure inside a different top-level “sharing” folder, it would be much more easy to share the files or folder granularly where they belong.

What I’ve tried

  • A thread that wanted a similar thing was poined towards Group Folders with ACL (see Blog Article)
    • With the group folder there is the Problem that when I forbid read access to folder A and, but allow Read access to Subsubfolder D, the read access to Subsubfolder D gets overruled
    • If I only forbid access to File in Folder A, any file that gets added would be accessible.
    • I get that this makes sense in some or even most scenarios, but I thought that there might be a setting or workaround to this
  • There is a solution with the File access control App
    • Same problem as with group folders. Deny to top level folder overrules access to subfolder
  • It was suggested to move all shared folders to a different folder that is not the root folder, but as we have a lot to share, this is just as unmanageable as putting it into the root folder.
  • It was suggested to create a naming scheme to create a better overview for the shared files, even though they all land in the root folder
    • Becuse of the nestig depth in the real application, the folder names would be way too long for tis to be feasible solution

Would be grateful for every piece of advice that would steer me to a solution. Thank you!

2

I don’t think there’s a “clean” solution for your szenario. As workaround I have created the Subfolders as single/individual groupfolders. Whereas the parent “Folder A” is just a regular folder which must be created for each user.