Permissions and Inheritance

Within the RDMS, there are four levels of permissions or user privileges to files and folders.

Own: The user owns the data object (file) or the collection (folder) and has the full permission on reading, modifying, and sharing the object.

Write: The user has read and write access to the object.

Read: The user can only read the object or its content. This also allows to make a (editable) copy of the file/folder.

None: The user does not have any permission on the object. One can use 'none' when removing the previously assigned permissions to a user. When you are the owner of an object and accidentally set your own permissions to 'none', you will internally still remain the owner and you can recover your privileges by again assigning another permission level.

Additional Notes for RDMS Team Drives and user permissions

Within the Team Drive space, the 'read' and 'write' permissions behave slightly differently:

1. In a RDMS Team Drive, users with 'read' permissions cannot downloads/copy a file/folder. Instead 'write' permissions are needed in this case.
2. In a RDMS Team Drive, users with 'write' permissions cannot delete files/folder with this permission level. Within this section of the RDMS, the owner has to delete files/folders.

Inheritance means that the permissions set on a collection/folder are also propagated to its subfolders and files. Also, with activated inheritance, newly created files and folder inherit the permission of the main folder.

By default, permission inheritance is active within the RDMS, but it can also be disabled on a per folder/collection basis. Users who decide to disable permission inheritance should be aware that this means that permissions on all (sub)folders and files have to be set individually.

Also, it should be noted that it is also possible to modify user permissions on specific subfolders or files when permission inheritance is activated on the main folder.