T: drive and X: drive - What's the difference?

Due to recent changes in Microsoft SharePoint, we've had to roll out a different version of our Cloud Drive mapper software. While very little changed with the T: drive, the X: drive changed quite a bit, making it function—at least on the surface—similarly to the T: drive, however there are significant differences in their behavior.

Basically, it breaks down to this:

• The T: drive is for accessing the files and folders that are located inside of Teams Channels. *
• The X: drive is for accessing the files and folders in the Documents library of a SharePoint site.

The reason this causes confusion is because Teams stores its data in SharePoint. This means that you can access the data in Teams from within SharePoint. *

The reverse however is not always true—just because you can see something in SharePoint does not mean that you'll be able to see it in the associated Team.

*with the exception of private channels (see below)

Example

I picked a random project Team to look at, 217352 - Wyoming PS. If I go into Teams and look at the Teams Channels that are created, I see this:

These are all the channels IT has created in Teams for the project (when it started, and as subjobs have come up). While there aren't any in this example, there could also be channels that other folks have created (either Public or Private ones).

If I go to this project on the X: drive, I see this:

You'll see there are more folders here than there were in the first screenshot (218352-475 Temp Folder and Signatures Needed - Jamie Carnes) that are not shown in Teams. These are standard file folders that someone on the project created either within File Explorer or in the SharePoint website. You can also see a few files that were saved in the root of the Documents library in SharePoint.

Now, if I go to the same project in the T: drive, I see this:

This looks just like the list of Teams channels, because that's what it is. You'll not see the non-channel folders, nor will you see the files in the root of the Documents folder.

Why not just use one drive instead of two?

While on the surface this would seem to solve the problem, the main issue with this is private Teams channels.

Private channels are handled differently by SharePoint. Since Private channels have their own security associated with them, they're not directly associated with—or stored in—the SharePoint site for the Team. They have their own SharePoint set up just for that channel.

This results in not being able to see these channels from SharePoint, because only Teams has that channel "anchored" within the Team, and the T: drive uses Teams for determining what you see.

To illustrate this, I created a Team with three channels, Correspondence, Financial, and Planning. I created Financial as a Private channel:

If I go to look at this Team on the T: drive, I see the same thing (albeit with no indicator that the Financial channel is Private):

Looking at it on the X: drive or on the SharePoint website however does NOT show the Financial channel:

If you have folders that have been created in SharePoint that you can't see in Teams—and you want them to be seen in Teams or the T: drive—you can create a new channel in Teams with the exact name of the SharePoint folder, and it will link the two together. Please note: Teams has restrictions on what special characters you can use in a channel name. You'll need to rename the SharePoint folder name if it includes any of the following characters:

~ # % & * { } + / \ : < > ? | ' "