Need an easy way to migrate files within Google Drive to Shared Drive?
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Do you have important files in your nonprofits’ Google Drive that are associated with their owners’ personal gmail address? Google lets you migrate those files to Shared Drive so your organization never loses access to them. This Google Drive trick for nonprofits makes it easier.
Google Workspace is fantastically easy for nonprofit start ups to set up and doesn’t take a lot of technical know-how to manage until you grow to a larger staff size. Community IT sees lots of growing nonprofits who want to stay with Google Workspace but realize they need some technical administrative help to manage it well. (We are fans of well-managed IT!) You can learn more about growing your nonprofit with Google Workspace here.
One of the common issues we run into is ownership of files. In Google world, the creator “owns” the files even when shared or saved on a shared Google Drive, and if that owner leaves the organization – through any number of scenarios – the organization no longer has access to those files.
Depending on how important the files are, that can cause problems! For example, if you are using an outsourced CFO – or if a photographer “shared” files with you – you can lose access.
A while back Google created “Shared Drive” and we recommend moving files from individually shared folders to organizationally owned folders.
In this podcast, Steve shares a Google Drive trick for nonprofits on migrating those files to Shared Drive relatively easily, by making the owner a temporary manager of the new folder.
The takeaways:
- Google regards the creator as the “owner” of files. Various options for sharing files may not grant complete access to those files for as long as they are needed.
- Community IT recommends creating Shared Drive in Google Workspace and migrating individual files and folders there to preserve organization access to them. This changes the “owner” from the individual to the organization.
- If you are running into migration issues with shared files disappearing, it is probably because the file was “owned” by someone outside your organization, or even someone within your organization using an individual gmail account to access Google. It is very easy to mistakenly log in to Google under other accounts to do your work!
- To migrate files in that situation, Google makes it possible to solve the ownership problem without a third-party tool. Staying within the Google universe preserves the file formats and makes migration easier. Links remain valid as will dynamic connections within Google Sheets.
- Community IT recommends creating a Shared Drive and temporarily making those external people managers with their individual gmail account. That gives them the ability to move whole folders of their files into the Shared Drive, where they become “owned” by the organization even after the individual leaves. This also helps clear up files created by external vendors where ownership needs to sit with the organization not with the individual owner, such as photos.
- It sounds complicated, but Steve walks through how to approach “ownership” in the Google Workspace universe and make data management as easy as possible.
Presenters
As Director of IT Consulting, Steve Longenecker divides his time at Community IT primarily between managing the company’s Projects Team and consulting with clients on IT planning. Steve brings a deep background in IT support and strategic IT management experience to his work with clients. His thoughtful and empathetic demeanor helps non-technical nonprofit leaders manage their IT projects and understand the Community IT partnership approach.
Steve also specializes in Information Architecture and migrations, implementations, file-sharing platforms, collaboration tools, and Google Workspace support. His knowledge of nonprofit budgeting and management styles make him an invaluable partner in technology projects.
Steve is MCSE and Microsoft 365 Fundamentals MS 900 certified and is a certified Professional Google Workspace Administrator. He has a B.A. in Biology from Earlham College in Richmond, IN and a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Tufts University in Massachusetts.
Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College.
She was happy to have this podcast conversation with Steve about this Google Drive Trick for Nonprofits.
Ready to get strategic about your IT?
Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director.
We constantly research and evaluate new technology to ensure that you get cutting-edge solutions that are tailored to your organization, using standard industry tech tools that don’t lock you into a single vendor or consultant. And we don’t treat any aspect of nonprofit IT as if it is too complicated for you to understand. When you are worried about productivity, change management, and implementation of new technology, you shouldn’t also have to worry about understanding your provider. You want a partner who understands nonprofits.
We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. If you can’t understand your IT management strategy to your own satisfaction, keep asking your questions until you find an outsourced IT provider who will partner with you for well-managed IT.
More on our Managed Services here. More resources on Google tools used by nonprofits here.
If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.
Transcript
Introduction
Carolyn Woodard: Welcome, everyone, to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, your host.
Steve Longenecker: My name is Steve Longenecker. I’m the Director of IT Consulting at Community IT.
The Problem with Personal Gmail Accounts for Organizational Files
A number of times recently, we’ve helped clients with use cases that I thought might be of interest. We have had situations where a client has been using Google Drive, but with personal Gmail addresses, so it might be clientname at gmail.com.
So it’s understood by all concerned that this is the intellectual property of the organization. But at the same time, it’s not actually under their governance, technically. And whoever owns that account, username and password, and 2SV, MFA, owns that stuff from Google’s perspective.
You can’t say, oh, but look, our name is right there in the username. It’s ours. If there was a bad breakup or whatever, just someone disappeared, because they left and forgot to transfer that information, and now it’s kind of gone.
So, the client wanted that in their own Google workspace, and what’s the best way to get it there? And if there are things like Google Docs and Google Sheets and stuff like that, a lot of the traditional third-party tools probably convert them to the Word doc format or the Excel format, which is not necessarily what people want.
The other thing is, if you are using a third-party tool that’s more or less copying from the source to the target, things like sharing, links would have to be redone because I’ve shared this Google Doc with people, but I’m going to download it and upload it, essentially, which is what the third-party tool does.
Essentially, now it’s a Word doc, but now I need to reshare it and now it’s in Word instead of Google. And what can I do about that? And what we found in doing some, I mean, this is not, I’m definitely not claiming that this is like some secret and that we, you know, this is probably well known to a lot of, you know, Google, hardcore Google people.
Shared Drives
But what we found was that you can, if you create a Shared Drive in the organization’s tenant, you can make external people not only members of that Shared Drive, but you can actually make them the managers.
That’s the formal role that Google uses. It’s like the top tier level. So, you make them a manager and that gives them the right to put whole folders of stuff into that. If they’re not a manager, if they’re only a content manager or only a, what are some of the other levels? Editor, contributor, there’s other, there’s lower levels.
They can only move maybe one document at a time, but to put a whole folder in, you need to be a manager. And so you share it, make that Gmail account a manager, and then the Gmail person logs into their drive as the Gmail person, and they suddenly see this Shared Drive, that’s the org Shared Drive, and they can drag even, drag and drop or click on the three dots and choose Move, and the whole folder can be moved into the Shared Drive.
And not only what’s really remarkable, and this is not the way Microsoft works, and in this particular instance, the Google way really is technically superior in this case.
The URL of the document is immutable. It doesn’t change. So, if you’ve shared that URL with people, that URL is still valid. If someone, let’s say it’s an Excel, not Excel, sorry, a Google Sheet, and someone actually has references to those cells into their own Google Sheets, those references will still work.
If you are moving a file or a folder from your My Drive, the Gmail account holder’s My Drive into the Shared Drive, if it is shared with people through a parent folder, it is shared with other people through inheritance, it’s called. And by putting it somewhere else, it’s no longer inheriting that. So, then they wouldn’t have access to it.
But if it’s shared explicitly, if it’s not shared through a parent, but that folder is shared with me or you, and we move it to the Shared Drive of the organization, you and I would still have access to it because all that sharing property goes with it, plus anybody who has access to the Shared Drive has access to it. So it’s really powerful. It’s really cool.
Unowned Files and Transferring Ownership
The challenge generally is that frequently these folders in the My Drive are not just containing files or subfolders that are owned by the Gmail account holder. They might have at some point shared that folder with other people, and I as the Gmail account holder have all the rights in the world to move my files into the Shared Drive.
But let’s say I shared it with you as another person, external, and you put your files in there. Those are your files. They are actually still in, they’re in my folder and I can see them, and I can even edit them, but they’re not considered my files. So, if I try to drag that folder into the Shared Drive, it enumerates everything before it even tries, and it says, we can’t move everything in this, we can’t move this folder because some of the items are not owned by you.
Carolyn Woodard: These three files, does it tell you these three files or not?
Steve Longenecker: It offers to give you the list of the files, and then we take different approaches depending on the situation, we advise different approaches depending on the situation.
The thing that doesn’t require any interaction with anybody else is to download those three files to your desktop or whatever. Don’t keep track of where they were downloaded from and be organized, but download them, then delete them. Now you’re not actually deleting them to be very clear because they’re not yours. What you’re doing is removing them from the folder. Then they’re considered orphaned files in the owner.
The owner still owns them, but now instead of being in your folder, they’re just loose in their My Drive. Then you can move it because those three files are no longer there. And then you could upload those three files from your copy.
Now, if there are share links on those three files, like these are copies, and they’re no longer owned by that person, they’re owned by you as the person who uploaded them. And the date modified will be the date of the upload, not the date of the file that you downloaded. So that’s like a workaround.
The other thing that we had occur in a situation like this, the files, and there were many of them, but not like thousands, but like hundreds of files, that were all owned by the same external Gmail account, and it was the same person, and it was actually a staff member of the organization.
And somehow, in the course of doing the work over the years, some of the files, it’s like hard to keep track of. They were identified as being owned by this Gmail account instead of being owned by the other. In that case, since that person was on the same team, and had the same motivations and incentives as everybody else, they got the list of files. They didn’t even bother to download them. They just deleted them, or again, remove them from the folder.
But then they also shared the shared drive with that person and said, here’s the list of files that we had to remove before we could move them. You have them in your My Drive because they’re owned by you. Put them back. Put them back where they belong. And so that person was able to do it because they were that person’s. So that was kind of an unusual circumstance, but it worked out really well.
And we did this, the other place we did it was not, not when the organization was trying to take control and gain full ownership, governance, etc., authority over files that were in, you know, My Drive accounts of what are called personal Google accounts or Gmail accounts, but they don’t have to even be, they don’t even have to be Google Gmail accounts, but, you know, their personal accounts are not owned by the organization.
Splitting Drives
The other place where we used this strategy was when an organization that was a project of a nonprofit and they all use Google. But that project was an incubator. The parent nonprofit, you know, fosters these projects nine times out of ten with the intention that at some point, they’ll be ready to spin out and go it alone. And this project was ready to stop being a project and start being an organization, start being its own thing.
So, they were spinning out. They just needed to get their files out of the old tenant. We basically created the tenant, created the Shared Drive they needed. And then, and we even did this for their My Drive files, which weren’t even shared. We created a Shared Drive called Carolyn’s Drive, the Shared Drive, but it was called Carolyn’s Drive.
We shared it with Carolyn at the other organization. Carolyn just basically moved her My Drive files to that Carolyn’s Drive, Shared Drive, and then logged out of that other Carolyn account on the other organization, logged into the new Carolyn account in the new organization.
The Shared Drive was there, and it was up to her whether she wanted to leave it in a Shared Drive, which only she had access to, or if she wanted to actually move them out of the Shared Drive back to the My Drive, which is fine, like either one, either, which in some ways I like the idea of actually finishing it all the way back to the My Drive, because having a Shared Drive called Carolyn’s Drive, that’s only for one person, it’s kind of weird aesthetically. Technically, it’s not a problem, but anyway.
Carolyn Woodard: It seems like eventually, because you do also have a My Drive, so then stuff would get confusing again. Was that file I need in the other My Drive or the My My Drive?
Steve Longenecker: Yeah. That’s right.
And the fact that Google makes it possible to do this, without even using a third-party tool, again, this is specific to a situation where the whole thing is happening in the Google universe.
You’re not leaving Google Drive or coming in from outside of Google Drive. It’s just that you’re coming from a Google Drive that’s not originally owned by the organization properly. It’s a personal Google account that maybe someone spun up at some point. And this happens all the time. You know, like a nonprofit, that’s not even a nonprofit yet. They’re just like getting started.
Carolyn Woodard: A group of friends that are going to be a nonprofit…
Steve Longenecker: A group of friends. Yeah. They get a bunch of Gmail accounts and then later, maybe two years later, they like finally are… They launch, they’re an actual… They have a domain name, and they get a Google workspace and it’s free and it’s great.
But now they have all these files all over the place. And it has historically would have been kind of a challenge, but with Shared Drives, you can just share the Shared Drives with these other accounts, giving them the manager permission and they should be able to really make a lot of headway of just putting everything in its proper place. So anyway, I wanted to share that with the people that might be interested.
Carolyn Woodard: I have a couple of questions to follow up. I feel like you’re asking the people to do something, right? So that might be a little bit of like you have to either sit with them or take them through a training. “We want you to put this folder in this folder now.”
Steve Longenecker: Yes.
Carolyn Woodard: Which is a little bit of a pain, but it seems like with a third-party solution, you would still have to do something to make it happen.
Steve Longenecker: Well, with a third-party solution, you have all these other, I don’t want to call them costs, but problems, like the fact that the sharing links have to be redone and all that.
Creating a Professional Shared Drive
So, what we have found is that more often than not, the My Drive stuff aside, when it comes to the way people have been working, usually one person has shared a folder from their My Drive with their colleagues who have been putting their stuff in that My Drive. And sometimes if it’s all Gmail accounts, you would need to work with the individuals. It might require a bunch of screen sharing or sitting down with the person.
Usually, I have found that with one case that I’m thinking of, we were working with the executive director, who I didn’t think was that technical, but I also didn’t think that they were scared of technology or ran away screaming when they heard technical terms. But they were definitely not the accidental techie of the office or anything.
And we basically walked through the first example or two together, and we’re like, so do you get it? And he was like, yep, I get it. I can take it from here. That’s kind of the way it seems like it rolls. It’s not that hard, but I agree, I wouldn’t necessarily think that you’d get 100 percent success if you just gave people some screenshots and said, follow these instructions. It might be the kind of thing where you show someone how to do it once, then maybe watch them do it once, and then they say, okay, I get it.
It’s actually a similar process. And we have blog posts about this, to when you’re not going from outside to inside, but just within a Google workspace, when you’re trying to unwind the fact that back in the day, there weren’t shared drives, and people just used their My Drive, and it’s all within the workspace, so there’s not a question of ownership or governance.
But there are challenges to using a shared folder from a My Drive versus a Shared Drive. There are strong advantages to using a Shared Drive. And so, we also help people with that. And there again, it’s the same idea of like, okay, here’s this shared folder called Programs, and here’s this now new Shared Drive called Programs.
We need to get the contents of this folder in the Program Manager’s My Drive into the Shared Drive. And it’s a similar thing of like, if there’s files that are owned externally, it causes problems, you need to figure out what the solution of that is. So it is, you know, it’s not like, because Google’s very, very particular, if that’s the right word, they honor that ownership.
You can’t just say, oh, this is, you know, it’s in the folder that I own, so I want to move it. No, if the file itself says that it’s owned by outsider at gmail.com, you cannot put it somewhere else. You can move it within maybe that folder structure that share, but you can’t move it to a Shared Drive.
You can download it, you can download it and then delete it. Again, not delete it, but remove it from the folder and then upload it. And that, look, that works a lot of times very well.
Like the classic example, because I remember this well from a client, we helped with this, was most of their files were owned and there was no question about the ownership. There was no problem. And so, we were rolling along, doing a lot of these migrations. In this case, it wasn’t from external to internal. It was just from My Drives, shared folders from My Drives into Shared Drives, trying to get that cleaned up.
Externally Owned Files
And suddenly we ran into this folder that every single file in it was owned externally. But we looked at it and what it was, it was a folder from their anniversary. And they had hired a photographer to take pictures of the events and so forth.
They had shared a folder with the photographer, said, please put all the pictures in here. There were thousands of pictures in this folder, but they were all owned by this independent contractor photographer person. And that person, that was like five years ago, that person may or may not have been available for assistance. And if so, I mean, you wouldn’t… I mean, it was like, you know, that relationship was over.
They were just pictures. They didn’t want to delete them. But like, that was very easy decision to be like, we’re just going to download all these pictures because we want to keep them. Then we’re going to remove them from the folder.
The photographer still owns them. If that photographer cares, which probably doesn’t. But either way, Google does its part.
But now we have our downloaded copies, which is all we need. Then we’re going to upload them, and the files all suddenly had the date of the upload, instead of the date of the event five years ago. That’s a loss. Metadata like that does matter. But the story behind it is well understood, and the folder name speaks for itself. It says pictures from dinner or something like that. And so those kinds of things can happen.
And in those cases, yeah, it does make sense just to simply download, remove the original, move everything, and then upload to the new location from your swing space, I call it.
But in other cases where, let’s say, that independent contractor photographer has their pictures littered throughout, not just in one folder, but everywhere. But there you’re still working with them.
Or that may be another, a better example would be lots of Google Sheets from your outsourced COO, CFO. So, your outsourced CFO has a bunch of sheets that have budgets and things like that. Most of them are owned by you guys, but a few of them are by chance, are owned by the Gmail account of the outsourced CFO. And they’re happy to give you the ownership, and you’re paying them still. They’re still your outsourced CFO.
Say, here’s the list. We need you to put these files in our new location. And then going forward, we’ll share this Shared Drive with you called Accounting, and you can just use it, and everything you put in there will be owned by us, because that’s how Shared Drives work.
Governance: Managers and Shared Folders/Shared Drives
Carolyn Woodard: Now, I have a question about in those cases, you said you can make that external person a manager for the purpose of moving these things. Then do you take away their manager rights after?
Steve Longenecker: I mean, the example we just said, if it’s an outsourced CFO, and they’re continuing to work with you, maybe it’s appropriate for them to continue to be a manager. Although, even then, maybe you would lower their rank, to be what the next lower down is called Content Manager. So, yeah, I do think of that as temporary. That’s just for the transition.
Carolyn Woodard: Probably a lot of those people don’t want that extra responsibility either, so.
Steve Longenecker: Yeah, there’s probably a liability consideration, too, you know. Yeah.
Carolyn Woodard: It sounds like from what you’re describing, you know, like you were saying earlier about using a third-party tool.
Steve Longenecker: A migration tool.
Carolyn Woodard: For a lot of Google users, and even if you have been, you know, not using Google super cleanly of what’s your document that’s in my drive, what is a shared document that was in a shared folder, now it’s in a shared drive, but still people who are comfortable with Google.
I like this method because you’re keeping them within the Google universe and like kind of that Google thought process of this person owns this file and they’re going to help us get it into the shared location where we can all work on it. And probably some older files, you know, you don’t even really need that.
Steve Longenecker: Oh, right. That’s another option, right? It’s not to download and upload, but just delete. Yeah, just look at it and be like, yeah, we don’t need this file. That’s just, you know, delete it.
Carolyn Woodard: But if you do want to just move everything and not worry about looking at it, like having that person help you, I really, this sounds like a good method. So, thank you for laying it out for us today.
Steve Longenecker: Yeah, I’ve found the part about the fact that the sharing links, the link to the document, if you’re using that link as a reference in other documents or other sheets, the fact that that’s all doesn’t change. It’s really powerful, like it’s so cool.
Sharing and Link Management – SharePoint
When you move something from one part of SharePoint to another, it definitely changes its URL, and you’d have to reshare it.
Like we even warn people when we talk about OneDrive, the URLs of OneDrive have your username embedded in them. If you look at a OneDrive link, you’ll see the username is in there and like towards the front, but not the very front.
And so, if somebody has to change their username, for whatever reason, they change their name, that’s going to change all the sharing links to their OneDrive, which could be a nuisance. It could be a lot of work to reshare things.
Oftentimes, a lot of those share links might be to things that are no longer actively being worked on, but nonetheless, it’s a pain.
Sharing and Link Management – Google Universe
But with Google, it doesn’t really matter. A file being created, I guess, gets a long, very complex, random, alphanumeric URL associated with it, and that kind of stays with it, whether it’s in your My Drive, your Shared Drive, a different Shared Drive, or even a Shared Drive of a different organization, the fact is that doesn’t really change.
And that the permissions that are explicit to it, like sort of travel with that document is really cool. I mean, I just was like, wow, this could be a real pain saver for some of these migration efforts that we’ve been helping some of our clients with. And it’s been really fun. Every once in a while, you get surprised by something being easier than you expect it to be, and it’s really nice. So, yeah.
Carolyn Woodard: That’s great. That’s great. That’s a success story.
Steve Longenecker: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well,
Carolyn Woodard: Thank you so much, Steve.
Steve Longenecker: You’re welcome!