Purpose

The purpose of this tutorial is to teach you how to use the Drive. By the end of the tutorial, you should be able to upload, create, delete, and share files on the Drive

How to access the Drive

A Drive is a file-storage and synchronisation service. It allows users to store files, synchronise them across devices, and share them.

In order to access the Drive, click on the "Drive" element in the navigation panel of the collab. Once you have done this, you will see the Drive within the Wiki window, as shown in the figure below.

NOTE: you need to be a member of the Team of a collab to be able to access its Drive.

Uploading files and folders

Upload can be achieved by using the "Upload" button or by dragging-and-dropping a file or folder from your desktop to the Drive. Note that you need write permissions to the collab (i.e. to be an editor or admin of the collab) to upload files to its Drive.

Creating files and folders

Files and folders can be created using the "New" button:

• New folder: Create a folder in order to structure your documents.

• New file: Create a file with no predetermined extension.

• New Markdown File: Create a file with a ".md" extension to use the Markdown syntax.

• New Excel / PowerPoint / Word File: Create a Microsoft Open XML Format document, which can also be edited collaboratively in Collaboratory Office

Sharing documents

The preferred way to share documents is to place them in a collab's Drive and to manage who has access to the collab through its Team app.

• Viewers of the collab have read-only access to the collab's content, including its Drive.
• Editors of the collab have read, modify, create and delete access to the collab's content, including its Drive.
• Admins have the same permission as Editors and can also modify the Team of the collab.

For a given collab, a user is only a viewer or editor or admin. Adding a user to one role removes that user from the other two roles.

Users can also be added via the Units or Groups to which they belong. In such a case, a user cumulates the roles, which is the same as the user having the role with the most permissions.

Users can also create links to files or folders.

• Public links created with the share button  bypass the collab's team permissions and give read-only access to any person with the link (read-only including for Editors and Admins of the collab's team).
• Smart links created with the internal link button  provide read or write access according to each user's role as defined in the collab's Team.

Versioning

The Drive maintains a number of older versions of all its files. It is easy to see when the versions were saved, by whom, to retrieve any version for comparison, and to rollback to a prior version.

To see all available versions of a file, select History from the additional drop down menu of each file.

The other options in the menu (“Rename,” “Move,” “Copy,” “Comment,” and “Details”) should be self-explanatory.

The “Open via Client” option refers to the possibility of running a Seafile client on your computer which will make the Drive appear as an additional storage partition on your computer.

Conclusion

By now, you should be able to upload, create, delete, and share files on the Drive. In addition, you should know some of the intricacies of using the Drive such as versioning.