All things being equal, migrating your Google Drive from one account to another should be easy:
- Transfer ownership of all files to the new account
- …
- Profit
Unfortunately, if your account is on a Google Apps Domain, your administrator may have disabled ownership outside the domain. If it’s Google Apps for Education, they didn’t get a say in the matter at all. (Fair enough – FERPA is a cruel mistress, after all.)
In principle, this doesn’t pose too much of a barrier, expanding the previous process to:
- Account A shares all files with Account B
- Account B creates local copies of shared files
- Account B trashes the original, shared files
- Enjoy a lovely beverage
And if all you have is a pile of files lying around, this isn’t a problem. But heaven help you if your files are in folders, since Google Drive lacks folder-copying (also known as xcopy) functionality.
Enter a guy named Eric, whose Copy Folder extension basically saved my behind. Steps 1-4 above now apply, with the added bonus that the extension automatically removes the irritating “Copy of…” prefix from all the new files. Brilliant!
It does seem to have the odd issue with enormous collections (>500 files in a folder), but all told I was able to save an estimated 20,000 files in a week, impossible by any other method.
