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Hi Everyone,

We recently moved to Google Workspace, and we would like to transfer our shared drives from Dropbox over to Google Drive just so we won’t have to pay for services which we can get with our Google account. We currently have 6TB worth of files with more than 100 users in Dropbox.

The files and folder are shared internally and also externally.

I have been researching for ways to do the migration while also retaining folder structures and permissions and could not seem to fine the best way to do this.

6 Spice ups
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Well, the “best way” depends on A LOT of factors specific to your environment. External sharing, retaining ACLs, retaining modified dates, moving to My Drive or Shared Drive, moving individual’s files or only “shares”, are these very active files, or mostly archive?

Those are some of the starting questions. The followup questions center around the tools that could be used. Some favorites include: CloudM Migrate, Rclone, CloudHQ.net. You’re going to need to manage the bulk copy and the delta migrations (especially if these files are being actively modified during the migration period.)

There might also be questions/ issues related to your editions of both Dropbox and Google Workspace and the storage / API access allowed.

The “worst way” is usually download it all and then upload it back up.

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss any of this.

1 Spice up
3

We want to retain external sharing ACLs and move them all to Shared Drive since there are no personal drives on Dropbox. Would any of those tools retain those as checking they can do migration but cannot migrate file permissions. They are a combination of active and archive files. The files won’t be accessed or modified during the migration process.

Any feedback about MultCloud?

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I am unfamiliar with MultCloud. External sharing ACLs are probably a non-starter unless you rely on “anyone with the link” access in Google for those files (even then you would need to get the external parties the link.)

To share securely, you would have to endure that the external parties have Google Accounts associated with their email address (just like they have DropBox accounts associated with their email addresses.)

1 Spice up
5

Do these tools transfer permissions during the migration process?

CloudM Migrate, Rclone, CloudHQ.net

6

On internal migrations, CloudM has the ability to map out users on the source and destination. I think CloudHQ.net has some ACL capabilities.