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My organization is converting files owned by individual accounts to team/shared drives owned by the domain. This is absolutely a pain in the ass and super tedious due to the amount of folders and content that there is. What makes matters even WORSE is that one cannot simply drag a folder from their drive to the shared drive. You have to drill all the way down and move files – this can get super tedious when there are many levels of folders.

I need a more efficient way to transfer all this content besides recreating the directory structure from an individuals drive to the team drive. Anyone ever run into this problem before when migrating their data to Team Drives?

4 Spice ups
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There is an option to transfer ownership of all files to another individual in Gsuite, you could do that.

Or you could use Google Drive File Stream and upload to the shared team drive via browser from the remote mapped My Drive.

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By default, only the owner of the folder/ file can move that item into a team drive. Or a super admin.
But, you can escalate the privileges of a user to be able to move anything they have visibility to in their My Drive. Create a new admin role and give them the Drive and Docs privilege of “move any file or folder into shared drives”
https://www.loom.com/share/7db63636961f4e30b2abce2d67726910

Make the moves from the Drive web interface - not Drive File Stream.

3 Spice ups
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Thanks Tony for the video. We’ll try that out.

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Unfortunately, there are a large amount of files that are owned by an address outside the domain. I know, pretty messed up, and this was the original impetus for moving all the content from my drives to shared drives.

1 Spice up
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Ugh… Any chance that outside owner can move the items into the shared drive?

If not - you still have options to make this less painful.

Do you need to maintain the doc URLs (like they’re published or reference by link or bookmark)? If no, you could use a tool like CloudHQ.net to make a COPY of the data into a Shared Drive. Pick a person who has a My Drive that displays the information you want to move. Use CloudHQ to copy that folder and its contents into a Shared Drive.

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I have access to the gmail account that is the principal owner of the Drive Folders, but a lot of the content within is owned by various individuals within our organization’s domain. It’s a giant clusterf—. But external users can’t move folders into a shared drive even if they have manager access.

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could you just share the root folder (external gmail) to your Gsuite super admin, and when you share choose advanced and indicate that you want to make the Gsuite admin owner? This may get all the files into your Gsuite domain, and then you can move them to the Team Drive after.

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You can’t transfer ownership across G Suite environments or from @gmail.com accounts into G Suite accounts.**
**except when using Shared Drives as an intermediary.

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I hadn’t even thought of this. I’ll try this. Also, granting privileges to move files and folders that someone can see into the team drive also worked pretty well. This may turn out to be easier than I first thought. Thanks everyone for the tips. I’ll circle back next week and give a status update.

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I have a similar issue with files owned by 3rd parties that no longer work for us, and are looking at GAT (Geeral Audit Tool)

I believe as long as a user has Edit access to a file or folder GAT can take ownership by creating a new file

This can be done in bulk too, Only issue is that the history of the files is removed,

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we’re running into a similar issue, documents owned by old employees that can’t be moved. one workaround is to download the file then reupload, but that is tedious and slow if there are many files.