Shared Drives

Introduction

A Hippius shared drive lets a group of people work in the same encrypted files, each signed in to their own Hippius account. You can share a drive straight from the desktop app, and drives other people share with you can be opened, or synced to your computer like any other folder.

Every drive belongs to one person, its owner. The owner pays for its storage and decides who gets in and what each person can do. Each folder you sync with the app is a drive you can share. You can also share just one folder inside a drive.

Shared drives work the same way in the desktop app and in the Hippius Console, and you can use both. A drive you share from the app can be managed from the console, and the other way round.

Who Can Do What

When you let someone into a drive, you give them one of three roles:

Role	What they can do
Viewer	Open and download files.
Editor	Open, download, upload and delete files.
Manager	Everything an Editor can do, plus invite people, change other people's roles, remove people, revoke links and approve email invites.

A Manager helps you run the drive, but it stays yours. Nobody can change their own role (a member leaves instead), and nobody can change or remove the owner.

A single folder can be shared as Viewer or Editor. Nobody manages a folder on its own: the drive's owner and its Managers look after who has it.

Sharing a Drive

1. Open
   Drive
   and find the drive in your list of folders.
2. Open its menu (three dots) and choose Share drive….
3. In the Share dialog, pick By email to invite someone by their address, or By link to create an invite link and send it yourself.
4. Press Done when you're finished. Everything you did has already taken effect.

You can also press Share a drive under Shared with Me on the Drive page, pick one of your drives and press Continue. The list tells you which of your drives are already shared, and with how many people. It opens the same Share dialog.

The Share dialog works the same as in the console. At the top are two tabs. By email sends someone their own invite. By link creates an invite link. The app remembers which tab you used last. Below them, People with access lists everyone who can get in, and is where you change a role or remove someone.

Once people have joined, the drive's row shows Shared with and the number of people, with a Manage access button beside it.

"Share drive" is different from Share via link on files and folders. A share link hands out a read only copy to anyone, no account needed. See Shared Links for that.

Inviting people by email

On By email, type an address, pick Viewer or Editor, and press Send invite. The invite is for that one person, works once and lasts 7 days. The email carries no key, so a forwarded invite is useless to anyone else.

If the app is locked, it asks for your unlock password first, then sends the invite. That's because the drive's key is packed into the invite for the person you're inviting. Cancel, and nothing is sent: the address stays in the box.

The person opens the link in the email and signs in to the console with the address it was sent to. If they already use Hippius, they join straight away, even if your app is closed. If they're new, see Keys are delivered for you.

To add a Manager, invite them as an Editor, then change their role once they have joined. Email invites can't make someone a Manager.

Sharing with an invite link

On By link, pick the role the link gives and how long it lasts, then press Create link. Press Copy and send the link yourself.

Link	Who it lets in	How long it lasts
Viewer or Editor link	Up to 50 people	24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or never expires (it works until you revoke it)
Manager link	One person	24 hours

If you want several Managers, invite them as Editors and change their role afterwards.

Treat an invite link like a password

Anyone holding the full link can join. The part after the # carries the drive's key, and the app hides it on screen, but Copy copies the whole link. Send it only to the people it is meant for, and revoke it when you no longer need it.

Keys Are Delivered for You

Most of the time there's nothing to deliver: when you send an email invite to someone who already uses Hippius, the drive's key goes into the invite, and they join as soon as they open it.

Someone who is new to Hippius needs the key delivered after they create their account. You don't have to do anything for that either: while you're signed in to the desktop app and it is unlocked, it delivers the key in the background, and the person joins shortly after. The app lets you know with a message such as "[email protected] can join Team Files." If the key couldn't go into the invite when you sent it, the app says they may need approving when they open it.

Your Managers' apps do the same, and so does the console while it is open and unlocked. Whoever gets there first lets them in. This works the same for an invite to a single folder as for a whole drive.

If nobody on your side has the app or the console open, the invite waits. You can let them in yourself: find the invite under People with access or in Manage access and press Approve. The invite shows as Opened while it waits for you.

Sharing a Single Folder

Sometimes you only want someone to see one folder, like the files for one client. You can share any folder inside a drive you own or manage, and the person sees that folder and everything in it, and nothing else. They don't see the rest of the drive, or even its name.

1. Open the drive and find the folder.
2. Open the folder's menu and choose Share folder.
3. On By email, type their address, pick Viewer or Editor and press Send invite. Or on By link, pick the role and how long the link lasts (24 hours, 7 days or 30 days), press Create link, and send the link to the one person it is for.

A Viewer can open and download what's in the folder. An Editor can also upload, rename and delete files inside it, but can't touch anything outside it.

A few things work differently for a folder, the same as in the console:

• Each folder invite is for one person. An email invite goes to one address, and a folder link works once, for the first person who opens it, and lasts up to 30 days. Make one link per person.
• People who have the whole drive can open the folder too. They appear in the folder's list, but you manage their access on the drive.

A folder shared on its own shows its own Shared with mark and its own Manage access, which lists only the people who have that folder. From there you can change which folders someone has, or remove them. You can't change someone's role on a folder they already have: to give them different access, remove them and invite them again.

Managing Who Has Access

Press Manage access beside a shared drive, or open it from the Share dialog. The panel lists the people in the drive, invites still waiting, and the links that are still active.

If you own the drive or are one of its Managers, you can:

• Change someone's role from the menu beside their name. Changes apply right away.
• Remove someone with Remove access in the same menu. They lose access at once.
• Change which folders someone has, for a person you gave single folders to. Choose Change folders in the menu beside their name, then untick a folder to take it away, or type the path of another folder in the drive and pick Viewer or Editor to add it. Folders they already have keep their access. They must keep at least one folder; to take everything away, remove them instead.
• Cancel an invite that hasn't been accepted, or approve one that is waiting for its key.
• Copy or revoke a link. A revoked link lets nobody new in, and people who already joined keep their access.
• Invite more people with Invite, or make a new link with New link. Each opens the Share dialog on the matching tab.

Removing someone, cancelling an invite, revoking a link and lowering someone's role each ask you to confirm right there in the row. When you move a Manager to another role, the invite links they created stop working too, so a spare link can't give them their old access back.

Viewers and Editors see a Who has access button instead. It shows the same list, without anything to change.

Links locked?

The app needs your unlock password to show invite links. If the panel says the links are locked, enter your unlock password to show and copy them.

Joining a Drive Someone Shared With You

Invites are accepted in the browser. Open the invite link, or the link in your invite email, and it takes you to the Hippius Console, where you sign in and press Join drive. Joining a shared drive in the console guide walks through it, including email invites.

Joining is free on every plan, because the owner pays for the storage. Once you've joined, the drive shows up in the desktop app too.

Drives Shared With You

Drives you've joined are listed under Shared with Me, below your own drives on the Drive page, and also in

Settings

→ Sync & Storage. On the Drive page the section is always there: until someone shares with you, it explains what shared drives are and offers Share a drive so you can start one yourself.

Each row shows the drive's name, your role, who shared it and how big it is. From there you can:

• Open it. Click the row to browse the drive straight from the network. Nothing is downloaded to your computer until you download a file.
• Sync it. Choose Sync to this computer in the row's menu and pick a folder on your computer. From then on it syncs like your own folders, and the row shows Synced here.

What you can change depends on your role. A Viewer who tries to add files is told they have Viewer access and can ask for Editor access. Anything you upload counts towards the owner's storage, not yours.

When you browse a shared drive, the Added by column tells you who put each file there, by name. Files added before we started recording this show as Owner. To see only one person's files, use the Added by filter: it lists the owner, the members by name, and Not recorded (shown as Owner) for those older files.

If the owner's account runs into a billing limit, the drive is marked Frozen. You can still open and download files, but nobody can change anything until the owner sorts out their billing.

A folder someone shared with you on its own gets its own row in Shared with Me, next to the drives. It shows the folder's name, the drive it lives in, who shared it, your role and the size of that folder. Click it on the Drive page to open the folder. You see that folder and what's inside it, and nothing else. A single folder can't be synced to your computer, so you always open it from the network, here or under Shared Drives in the console.

Leaving a Shared Drive

• In Shared with Me, open the drive's menu and choose Leave drive.
• If you sync the drive, you can also choose Leave shared drive from its menu in your drive list.
• For a folder shared with you on its own, choose Leave folder in its menu. You also lose any other folders of the same drive that were shared with you.

You lose access to its files and the drive stops syncing. Anything already on your computer stays there, and the owner can invite you again. You can also leave from the bottom of the Manage access or Who has access panel.

Sharing and Your Plan

Sharing a drive or a folder, sending email invites, creating invite links and approving email invites are included with the Plus, Max and Scale Drive plans. See Billing.

On Free and Starter, the Share dialog still opens, but an upgrade prompt stands in for the tabs that add people, and so does Share a drive. Anyone who already has access keeps it, and you can still see and remove them. Upgrade plan takes you to the plans in Settings.

On a drive you manage for someone else, the owner's plan is the one that counts, not yours.

Where to next

• Shared Drives in the console: join invites and manage who has your drives and folders from the browser.
• Drive: your sync folders and files.
• Shared Links: share a file or folder with someone who has no Hippius account.
• Billing: the Drive plans that include sharing.