Migrating Google Drive Files to Google Shared Drives

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Overview

Google Shared Drives facilitate seamless collaboration within a team, research group, committee, or department, ensuring smooth file management through employee transitions and student graduation. With Google's shift away from unlimited storage, leveraging Google Shared Drives has become increasingly necessity for F&M. Google Shared Drives ensure the continuity of files and data even after an individual's departure from the College.

Unfortunately, migrating files to a Shared Drive is not as straightforward as it may seem. As the cleanup of accounts of individuals no longer active at the university continues, please follow this guide to ensure that you are able to migrate files to a Google shared drive.

How to

Requirements for Migrating Files to a Google Shared Drive In order to migrate files to a Shared Drive, you must first:

Have a contributor, content manager, or manager role within a Shared Drive
Have either owner or editor access to all files or folders you want to migrate

Setting up a Google Shared Drive

Faculty and staff can create a shared drive directly through Google Drive. To create a Shared Drive, click on the Shared drives menu, the click the + New button.

How to Move Files and Folders

Drag and Drop (Easiest for a few files)

Open Google Drive on a computer.
In the left sidebar, expand Shared drives.
Navigate to your files in My Drive.
Click and drag the files/folders directly into the desired Shared Drive in the sidebar.

Or use the "Move to" Menu (Best for organization)

Right-click the file or folder you want to move.
Select Organize > Move.
Click All locations and select Shared drives.
Choose the specific Shared Drive and click Move.

Understanding Access & limits

Understanding your level of access on files and folders in Google Drive is important for the migration to Shared Drives.

Ownership Change: Once moved, the Shared Drive becomes the owner of the file, not you.
External Files: You cannot move files owned by someone outside your organization into a Shared Drive.
Folder Moves: By default, only Managers of a Shared Drive can move entire folders into it. Contributors can usually only move individual files.
Google Forms: You cannot move Google Forms that have "File Upload" questions into a Shared Drive.
Item Limits: A single Shared Drive can hold a maximum of 500,000 items (including files, folders, and shortcuts).