Google-drive – What’s the best way to take ownership of a personal non-GSuite Google Drive folder

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When an assistant creates a new subfolder in a shared folder, it is owned by that assistant. If the assistant leaves, unshares, and deletes files, I would be out of luck. Also, if a different assistant leaves and I wish to remove sharing by selecting multiple files, Drive gives an error when the folder is not owned by me. There is no way to take ownership of a folder in a folder in which you own. There is no way to copy a folder from the web interface either. Currently I

copy the folder in Windows Explorer
wait for Google Sync to upload the new folder contents
unshare the old folder with everyone except the owner in the web page to prevent confusion on where to store new files
delete the old folder in the web page
rename the new folder to the old name in the web page (no hotkey for that either) so that Google Drive PC client doesn't get confused as to which folder I am working with because if I rename it in Windows Explorer it might think it's the same as the old folder

Is there a faster, easier way to take ownership of a folder in Google Drive?

Best Answer

The assistant should change the owner to you before they leave. Otherwise, you're stuck with the process you've found.

Obviously, in G Suite the administrator would be able to take care of all of this.

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 – Google Drive documents with transferred ownership don’t appear in “My Drive”

Short answer

To make that a shared file or folder appear in "My Drive" of the account to which those items were shared, the account user should move those items to the account "My Drive". Otherwise the items will become orphaned.

Proposed "scenario"

User A created a folder.
User A shared the folder with User B ~~and made User B owner~~.
~~User B logged in and can't find the folder in "My Drive"~~.
User B logged in and look for the shared folder in "Shared with me".
User B move the shared folder to "My Unit".
User A transfer the ownership of the folder to User B.

Explanation

From “Shared with me” - Drive Help

The "Shared with me" view in the left-hand side navigation lets you see the files and folders that other people have shared with you, beginning with the most recent.

...

Add files to “My Drive”

To make sure you have the most current version of a file in the Drive folder on your Mac or PC, you need to store it in “My Drive” in Google Drive online.

Here’s how to add something to “My Drive” from “Shared with me” in the new Google Drive:

Sign in to drive.google.com.

Click Shared with me in the left-hand side navigation.

Hover over a file and click the Add to My Drive icon. The files you chose will automatically sync to the Google Drive folder on your computer.

From Find your files - Docs editors Help

...

If an item in Google Drive loses all of its parent folders, it becomes an orphan. The item still exists, but it may be a little harder to find.

How does a file become orphaned?

Files are orphaned due to situations related to sharing and permissions. For example:

User A creates folder X in his Drive.

User A shares folder X with user B.

User B creates item Y inside folder X.

User A trashes folder X, and empties his trash.

At this point, item Y becomes orphaned. It was never created inside of user B's My Drive, and its parent folder (folder X) is now gone. Note that item Y is not deleted along with with folder X because user A can't delete user B's file.

To prevent that a file that it's ownership will be transferred become an orphan file, do the following:

User A share the file with User B. Repeat as necessary.
User B add the shared files to "My Unit" or any folder beneath it.
User A transfer the ownership of the files to User B.