--- title: "Setting up Drive notifications" description: "Drive notifications tell you when someone else adds, changes, moves or restores a file in a group drive you belong to. Set them per drive, or for every drive at once." category: getting-started section: notifications-and-status tags: [notifications] type: Tutorial lastUpdated: 2026-08-26 locale: en canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/getting-started/drive-notifications --- # Setting up Drive notifications ## Setting up Drive notifications Drive notifications tell you when someone else uploads, updates, moves or restores a file, or creates a folder, in a **group drive** you belong to. They stay inside Talkspirit: they appear in the drive's **Activity** panel and put a badge on **Drives** in the navigation. Drive activity never sends you an email. You control them in two places. The bell beside a drive's name covers that one drive. A single switch in **Profile and preferences** covers all of them at once. ## What Drive notifies you about Five kinds of activity produce a notification, and you can switch each one on or off separately: - New files uploaded or created - Files updated - Files moved to the group - Files restored - New folder created Three things are worth knowing before you start. **Only group drives count.** Anything you do in **My drives** produces no activity notification, for you or for anyone else. **You are never notified about your own actions.** The list only ever shows what other members of the group did. **Everything is on by default.** A new member of a group starts with notifications enabled on that group's drive and all five activity types ticked, so this is something you turn down rather than turn on. ## Change notifications for one group drive Open **Drives** in the navigation, select the drive under **Groups drives**, and click the **bell** beside the drive's name. A bell with a line through it means notifications for this drive are currently off. ![A group drive open in the Drives app, with the bell button beside the drive name in the breadcrumb highlighted and labelled "Notification settings for this drive"](/images/getting-started/drive-notifications/01-drive-notification-settings-button.png) In the dialog that opens: 1. Use **Enable notifications** to turn this drive on or off. 2. With it on, tick the activity types you want under **Notification types**. 3. Click **Save**. ![The "Notifications of General" dialog, showing the Enable notifications switch turned on and the five Notification types checkboxes all ticked](/images/getting-started/drive-notifications/02-drive-notification-types.png) The bell only appears on drives belonging to groups you are a member of, and each drive keeps its own settings. ## Change notifications for every drive at once 1. Open the avatar menu at the top right of the classic Talkspirit app and select **Profile and preferences**. 2. Select **Notifications**. 3. Find the **Desktop app and browser notifications** section and the row that begins *"Notifications will allow you to receive updates on your Drive's elements"*. 4. Switch it on or off. This switch is not only a default. Turning it on enables notifications on every group drive you belong to, and turning it off silences them all, overwriting whatever you had set drive by drive. Set the individual drives afterwards, not before. One thing will surprise you here: this section only appears once you have allowed notifications for Talkspirit in your browser. If you have blocked them, the section shows a message about your browser settings instead and the Drive row is not displayed. Use the bell on each drive in that case. ## Where the notifications appear Inside a drive, click **Activity** at the top right to open the **Drive notifications** panel. Each entry names the person, what they did, the file or folder, and the drive it happened in. Clicking an entry takes you to that drive. A red dot sits on the **Activity** button while you have unread activity, and a badge appears on **Drives** in the navigation. Closing the panel marks everything in it as read. ## What Drive notifications do not do **No email.** Group drive activity produces no email at all, so nothing here reaches your inbox, and your administrator's organisation-wide switch for notification emails does not affect it either. **No mobile push.** Drive activity is excluded from mobile push notifications. **No browser pop-up.** Despite sitting under the *Desktop app and browser notifications* heading, Drive activity does not raise an operating-system notification. It only fills the Activity panel and the badge. Sharing a file from **My drives** is a different mechanism, and depending on how your organisation is configured it can send the recipient an email. That is separate from everything above, and neither the bell nor the switch in your preferences controls it. ## What's Next? - [Notifications overview](/en/getting-started/notifications) - [Drive labels](/en/collaboration/working-with-drive-labels) - [Downloading, moving, or deleting Drive files in bulk](/en/collaboration/download-move-delete-files-from-the-drive-in-bulk) - [Group statistics](/en/communication/group-statistics) - [Manage enabled apps on the groups](/en/communication/manage-enabled-apps-on-the-groups)