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Good morning everyone -

I am in a GAFE (Google Apps for Education) environment. I had a teacher that left us this summer, so I did the normal routine of suspending the account for a few months and then next summer after 1 full year has passed I will delete the account.

This user had several files in the drive account and she would like access to them. I thought I could go in and simply un-suspend the account, change the password, log in, and share then change ownership of the files to her new account at her new school. I was wrong!

A quick Google search tells me that it is not possible to change the owner of a folder to someone outside of the domain and that an error will be produced which is the same error I received. I am wondering has anyone found a workaround for this or another method.

Thanks in advance for your responses!

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That is correct. Transfer them to yourself and have her give you access to a GDrive folder and upload them there.

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Rockn,

Is correct. One other option is to unsuspend sign in under that account and then use Google Takeout (assuming you have it enabled for you domain) https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=backup&passive=1209600& ; to download the contents locally. You can then get that archive to her.

Alternately, if you have admin access to both Google environments, you can do a Drive migration using a tool like CloudMigrator (this would be quite a pain to setup for a one-off like this.)

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Ran across the same issue a while back. Opened up their account and started emailing the stuff to their new account out of the old one. Mine did not have too much stuff in it.

You could create a transfer folder in your domain and change the folder to not inherit, alter the permission settings to allow outside access with link to the one folder, move their account in there and share the old to the new, let them copy the material over then disable the account again. Keep it for another month or so then delete.

EDIT - I am probably 2 revisions back in my usage so things may have changed.

1 Spice up
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Can’t you do Google Takeout of the stuff and send her that?

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Keep in mind that when using Takeout or any migration tool the user will loose all file revision history. If this is important for them then look using a designated account (you could just keep her’s active if it’s a one off) for scenarios like this where you can move the users files into and then share it with their new email. Put all the files in a single folder so you only have to share 1 item.

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Keeping active as “a one-off” violates EU data protection laws. No idea how the law is outside EU, but especially with the GDPR rules which kick in in April 2018, you have to be ultra careful.

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Phil Mills curious what violates any EU data protection or now GDPR rules by keeping an account active. Many EDUs give their staff and students an account for life and their accounts and/or data never get deleted.

@philmills

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John4120 You can now make a Team Drive, share with that users Gmail account, move their files to it and allow them to then move those files to their My Drive in their personal space.

@john4120