Migrating from Google Shared Folders to Google Shared Drives

Don't let the names fool you; Shared Folders are very different from Shared Drives. Formerly known as Team Drives (and a much clearer name, in my opinion) Shared Drives were established in part to overcome some of the problems with Shared Folders. Generally, if there is more than one person creating and sharing documents, you will want to be using Shared Drives.

Often groups will have started off using Shared Folders because it is easy and free and already available in your standard google/gmail account. Migrating across to Shared Drives is easy enough but a planned and structured approach will save some pain in the longer term. 

Structure your new Shared Drives

You only need one Gsuite User

As I mentioned in my previous post, If you are a little organisation doing things on the cheap, you only need one Gsuite Business Account to benefit from the main features of Shared Drives. Essentially, this Gsuite user account will become the administrator that will set up sharing permissions on each Shared Drive to share the drive with other standard google/gmail accounts. 

In the drive settings for a particular drive you need to edit

Sharing outside [Organisation A]

and tick 

People outside [Organisation A] can be given access to the files in this shared drive

Set User Permissions at the Drive Level

Be aware that you can't define user permissions at the folder level, only the file level or the drive level. So, setting user permissions at the drive level provides the cleanest way of keeping control of who has access to what file. The only other option is to allow users to define sharing permissions on all individual files within a drive, which can become quite a mess (and far too time-consuming to track if you are allowing drives to be shared outside the organisation). 

In the drive settings for a particular drive you need to edit

Sharing with non-members

and tick

Only members of this shared drive can access files in this shared drive

You can then add individual google/gmail accounts as members of the drive and define their permission level to all files and folders within. Permissions levels are: Manager, Content Manager, Contributor, Commenter, Viewer.

Create Shared Drives Based on Who Needs Access

Related to the previous point, it is logical to create shared drives based on who needs access. For example, you may have the following drives:

- Admin - Common (editable by all staff)

- Admin - Confidential (editable by Admin staff only)

- Program Resources (editable by Program staff, visible to Admin staff)

I find it helpful to include who has access to the drive as part of the drive name. This reminds all staff using the drive who the audience/user base is.

Try to avoid creating too many shared drives. Content Managers cannot move files between drives. Only Managers can.

Consider the staff/volunteers in your organisation, the work that they do and the files that they store. From a master account, take a look through all the different sorts of files that are stored in your organisation's existing shared folders and consider who needs access to what. From here, create a list of the Shared Drives that you need and who needs access to each shared drive. 

Look through the list of Shared Drives you have created. Do any of them have the same or almost the same members and access levels? If so, ask yourself if these Shared Drives could be merged into a single Shared Drive (perhaps with a slightly different name)?

Moving files and folders to the new Shared Drives

Assuming there is only one Gsuite user account, then they are also the admin for the Gsuite domain. Only this account can transfer folders (including their contents) from MyDrive to Shared Drives.

Google now only lets you transfer file ownership between personal google accounts or between gsuite/workspace accounts on the same domain. This makes things harder.

If all contributing accounts are personal google accounts (or are in the same workspace domain) then get them to transfer ownership of all relevant files to a single google account. To do this, in Goolge Drive, do an advanced search on all files owned be me and then transfer ownership of all of these files in one go (you will probably need to chunk it down to 50 or so at once or the system will be grindingly slow).

People can, move files (but not folders) in Shared Drives owned by a different Google Workspace account as long as they are members of that Shared Drive.

So, either have all contributors move their relevant files over or do it for them. This can be a very long-wided manual process. Google Workspace Marketplace app called Folgo  can be very helpful for analysing folder structures and copying them (with or without the files contained within). 

Quick and dirty alternative: just download the entire directory. All files and folders (including subfolders) will be downloaded. Then upload this to your Google Shared Drive. (NB: Google docs and Sheets will be converted to Microsoft Word and Excel format and version history will be lost. Google forms and apps scripts will not be downloaded).

How to delete files and folders whilst preventing orphans

If you have transferred ownership of all relevant files and folders to the one google account then you can safely and cleanly delete them all in one go. However, if some of them are owned by different users (e.g. if you used the Quick and dirty alternative above) then you will have more work to do to delete all files and folders, as follows.

In a shared collection within MyDrive, you need to be careful when deleting folders to make sure that you don't end up with orphaned files and folders. 

To prevent this from happening for each Gmail user account:

1. create a new folder in Mydrive and call it "to delete"

2. using the google drive advanced search find all files (but not folders) that are located in the root folder that you wanted to transfer. A list of files will be shown.

3. Select all these files and move them to the folder "to delete"

4. delete the folder "to delete". (You have deleted the relevant files for this owner without deleting the folders).

Once you have gone through the above for each Gmail user account, go through it again for all the folders (instead of files). 

I know, it's a pain but it's better than trying to work out which orphaned files are the ones you want to delete and which ones are ones that were orphaned at some other time.

Some tools that may help you

WARNING: I am not recommending any of these tools as I have not necessarily tested them. For these tools to work they need deep access to your google drive files and folders - which is clearly a significant security risk. It would be simple for a malicious actor to create and promote such a tool and compromise your data. Or, a bug in the application could destroy your data or mess up the structure of your folders.

Google file and folder management tools are very restrictive, including:

• Google Workspace does not allow you to transfer ownership of files or folders from the organisation to external accounts. This is such a pain!
• You can move folders (with all the files and subfolders they contain) from your google mydrive across to a google shared drive only when both the mydrive and the shared drive are owned by the same organisation
• You can only move files (including groups of files) but NOT folders from your google mydrive across to a google shared drive only when the mydrive account is a member of the shared drive but is external to the organisation that owns the shared drive.
• You cannot move groups of files/folders if any of them are not owned by the account that you are currently using.

Some tools have been created by random people, to attempt to work around these limitations.

• The winner: Google Workspace Marketplace app called Folgo which provides a bunch of useful tools for bulk copy of folder structure (with or without the files) and bulk transfer of ownership, auditing a drive etc. Active responses to reviews and good website. Active developers. 200,000+ users/downloads. 4.7 stars.  I have just used this and it is extremely helpful.
• Google Workspace Marketplace app called Workspace Tips & Tools which offers tips plus functions similar to Folgo. Most people seem to use the tips. Reviews are old and fairly inactive. 600,000+ users. 4.4 stars
• Chrome extension called Copy Folder can copy a folder with its subfolders and files. 100,000+ users. 4.7 stars. app updated Sept 2019
• Chrome extension called Google Drive Migrator can copy a folder with its subfolders and files to a different account. 30,000+ users. 4.1 stars. app updated Aug 2017
• Chrome extension called Transfer Ownership to transfer ownership of files and folders (and all contents and sub-contents). But you cannot transfer outside your orgnisation (if using google Workspace). 4,000+ users. 3.7 stars.