How Nora's Small Edit Team Stopped Overwriting Each Other's Files
A short case from the programme: Nora's four-person team kept losing cuts to accidental overwrites until they mapped who could read, edit and approve each folder on their shared drive.
Marcus Delgado · · 6 minutes to read
The problem Nora brought to the course
Nora runs a small production office making short branded films and event recaps. When she joined the Access Permissions module, her team of four shared one network drive, and everyone had full rights to everything. It had worked while there were two editors and one project at a time. By early autumn there were six jobs in motion, a freelance colourist dipping in and out, and a producer who liked to tidy folders on Friday afternoons.
The symptoms were familiar to anyone who has managed a shared drive. A rough cut disappeared one week, replaced by an older export saved under the same name. A client-approved master was edited by someone who thought it was a working copy. Nobody had acted carelessly. The drive simply gave every person the same power over every file, so any small slip could reach anything.
Nora's first message to me was short: she did not want a security project, she wanted to stop losing work. That framing shaped everything we did afterwards.
Starting with a plain list of who touches what
We did not open the drive's settings first. Instead, Nora wrote down the roles on her team and what each one genuinely needed to do. The editors needed to read raw footage and write to their own project folders. The producer needed to read nearly everything and approve finished exports. The freelance colourist needed to read one set of clips and deliver graded files back to a single place.
Writing this out took one working session and surfaced a few surprises. Nobody except the producer actually needed to change a final export. Nobody needed to delete original camera files at all, yet everyone could. The list gave Nora a vocabulary for the conversation with her team: read, edit, approve, and no access.
This is the habit the module tries to build. Permissions are a description of how people work, written before any software is touched.
- Name each role, not each person, so the plan survives staff changes
- For every folder group, note who reads, who edits, who approves
- Mark anything that nobody should delete
Building the permissions matrix
With the list in hand, Nora built a simple matrix: roles down the left, folder groups across the top, and one of four letters in each cell. The folder groups followed the structure she had already adopted in the earlier modules: camera originals, working projects, exports for review, approved masters, and archive.
Camera originals became read-only for every editor, with write access limited to the person ingesting new cards. Working projects were editable by the assigned editor and readable by the producer. Exports for review were editable by editors but approved masters were writable only by the producer. The freelancer received a single delivery folder and nothing else.
The matrix fit on one page. Nora printed it and pinned it near the producer's desk, which turned out to matter more than any setting, because people could see why a door was closed to them.
What changed in the first weeks
The first benefit was quiet. Nobody could overwrite an approved master, so the question of which file the client had signed off stopped coming up. Editors reported that the read-only originals felt like a relief rather than a restriction, since they no longer worried about nudging a clip by accident.
There was friction too. One editor needed to fix a mislabelled master and had to ask the producer, which took a day. Nora decided that was an acceptable price and added a short rule for urgent corrections: ask in the team chat, producer unlocks, producer relocks. The friction was real but small, and it replaced a much larger and less visible cost.
Nora also noticed the matrix made onboarding easier. When a new assistant joined, she assigned a role instead of explaining a dozen unwritten habits.
Where the plan stayed imperfect
It would be misleading to present this as a finished story. Nora's team also uses a cloud storage account for client review links, and the permissions there did not mirror the network drive for a while. A shared link set to allow editing was still open weeks after a project ended. Catching it required a recurring review, not a one-time setup.
We added a short monthly check to her routine: open the matrix, compare it with the real settings on both systems, and remove access that belongs to finished projects. It takes her about twenty minutes. The check is dull, and that is exactly why it works.
Permissions drift as people come and go, so the matrix needs a named owner. In Nora's office that is her, and she has put the review in her calendar.
- Review shared links when a project closes
- Remove freelancer access on the delivery date
- Keep one named owner for the matrix
What you can take from Nora's case
Nora's approach is easy to copy because it begins with paper. Describe the roles, decide what each one should read, edit or approve, and only then set rules on the drive. If your team is small, a single page may be enough. If it is larger, the same logic simply repeats for each group.
In the module you practise this on a sample project drive and finish with a matrix you can adapt. You will also write the short rule for urgent exceptions, because every real team needs one. The goal is modest: fewer lost cuts, clearer ownership, and a setup a new colleague can understand in a few minutes.
Nora's drive is not locked down tightly, and it does not need to be. It is simply organised around how her team works.
Nora did not buy new software or hire an administrator. She wrote down who does what, turned that into a one-page matrix, and gave one person the job of keeping it honest. Her team still makes mistakes, but they are smaller and easier to trace. If your shared drive grants everyone the same power, the Access Permissions module is a practical place to start, and you can begin with a pencil and a list of roles.
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