Google-drive – Transfer ownership from the personal Google Drive account to Google Suite for Education

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In my personal Google Drive I have a folder and we are migrating to Google Suite for Education. From my personal user I shared that folder to my new Google Suite user with no problem.

I want to transfer the property (ownership) to my GSuite user so that I could then delete the folder and free up the space of my Personal Drive. I get an error message:

We are sorry; the property cannot be transferred to "mygooglesuiteaccount". This can only be transferred to a user whose domain is the same as that of the current owner.

Exporting the files from https://takeout.google.com does not help me because the files of sheets, docs, slides are converted to Microsoft Office format and I want to keep the original Google format. Also, downloading the files to re-upload them with the other user, implies to lost the sharing information.

Did anyone have / have the same problem?
Thank you in advance.

Best Answer

As the error message says, there is no way to transfer files between accounts from different domains but you could make copies using your G Suite account.

The basic steps are:

Using the personal account, share the files from the personal account to the G Suite Account
Using the G Suite account, copy the files

Transferring files across from restricted Google Drive account

Related Solutions

Google Drive – How to Recursively Set Ownership of Files and Folders

I created a command-line tool to handle this.

After following the setup instructions on the GitHub project, you can run the tool with a specified path prefix and the email address of the new owner:

python transfer.py PATH-PREFIX NEW-OWNER-EMAIL

After getting authorization from OAuth, it will recursively walk the Google Drive account it got authorization to, match against the path prefix (ignoring non-matches), and then transfer ownership to the new email. If the new email address indicates a user who isn't even shared on the item yet, it will handle that as well. The current owner will not lose access, but the new or old owner can revoke it.

I should note that it's not always possible to transfer ownership of an item in Drive. For example, it's not possible to move ownership for an item from G Suite (Google Apps for Work) account to a normal GMail account. It can be shared (which the script will do), but ownership transfer will fail.

Google-drive – Transferring files across from restricted Google Drive account

Unfortunately, Google does not allow you to transfer ownership between domains (and it considers gmail.com its own domain as well). There are ways to create copies (and alternative ways), but to answer the question of accomplishing a true transfer across domains, you can't.

I strongly desire to have Google invalidate this answer (or some clever hacker find a workaround) at some point in the future, and when that happens, I will gladly delete this answer.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Google Drive – How to Recursively Set Ownership of Files and Folders

Google-drive – Transferring files across from restricted Google Drive account

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