Copy Your GAFE Drive Files to a Personal Google Account

You’ve just taken a job in another district. You’re wondering if there is a way to copy or transfer ownership of Google Drive files from your  GAFE/ GSuite for EDU account (@yourschool.org) to your personal Google account (@gmail.com). Until recently, I didn’t know of any other way than Google’s Takeout service (which requires downloads and file conversions) or to actually just download files and folders (which again, converts to Office formats and requires uploading and converting back to Google formats).

I’ve had to do the whole download, upload, convert process before and it is one pain in the behind. But not anymore!

Back in April, Chris Craft presented Drive Migrator in one of his sessions I attended at the Indiana GAFE Summit.  Drive Migrator creates a copy of all your selected files and folders and recreates them in your personal account. No downloads. No uploads. No conversions. Just pure copy-behind-the-scenes-bliss. Hallelujah!

My team at work and I put on a webinar earlier this week that went over Drive Migrator. It’s a pretty simple process.

 Copy Your GAFE Drive Files to a Personal Google Account in Three Easy Steps

(Note, before you do this, please make sure you have permission to “take” any work from your district. Most will give you the a-okay to at least take content and materials you created.)

1. Share the folder(s) you want to copy from the GAFE account with your personal Gmail account. Tip: move everything that you want to copy into one folder, and share that one top level folder.
2. Install Drive Migrator on your personal Google account.
3. Run Drive Migrator on your Personal Google account. This is not an instantaneous process. It took a couple hours for the batch of files I copied to test it out.

Check out the video below for a quick overview.

Hope this helps!

Tech To You Later!
-Katie