Giving edit access to Google Drive documents is sufficient. The way these files work, once they are shared with a user, the file will appear in their "Shared with me" list
If they remove or delete a file from this list, it will not remove the document from any other user's list, nor will it destroy the file. Only the owner can trash a document.
Learn more about trashing documents here: http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2494934&p=restore_trash_collab
If the owner trashes a document, they can get it back from their Trash folder:
Learn how to recover a file or folder that you moved to the trash.
If something in Google Drive is moved to the trash, you'll see a
warning and you may lose access to it at any time. Read one of the
following sections to learn how to restore it to your Google Drive
from the trash. When you restore something, it'll be recovered in
Google Drive on the web, to the Google Drive folder on your computer,
and to your mobile devices.
If the item is in a folder, you’ll need to restore the entire folder
to recover any individual items inside of it.
Owners
If you're the owner of something and you’ve placed it in the trash,
you'll see a warning that reads "This item is in your trash" when you
open the doc or file.
If you’d like to restore a doc or file to your Google Drive:
Search for it in the Trash. Select the file(s) or doc(s) you’d like to
recover. Click the Restore button.
Folders and file structures behave the same way, if regular editors remove these it will disappear from their "Shared with me" list but it only affects them, not the rest of the collaborators.
Best Answer
I wrote a Google Apps Script macro that you can attach to a new spreadsheet (or an old one, if it would make any sense) that accomplishes this task. To attach a script to a spreadsheet, go into that spreadsheet (or create a new one), click "Tools"->"Script editor...", copy and paste the code into the editor, click "Resources"->"Current project's triggers," select "onOpen" under Run, select "From spreadsheet" under Events, make sure the third drop-down menu reads "On open," then save the script under a name of your choice.
The code below:
Here's the code:
To run the script, reopen the spreadsheet after first saving the script, then click "List"->"Public Files Owned by...".
Something to bear in mind is that this is an inefficient script; if you have a lot of files stored in your Drive, this could take a long time to execute. In addition, it is currently written to accommodate up to 499 entries. (Increasing this maximum is simply a matter of raising the number for the 'B' column in the
cells
declaration.) It is also currently written to output only the first parent folder if a file is contained in multiple folders.