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We have a shared folder that it many years old, and predates Shared / Team drives. This folder has thousands of sub-folders (each owned by different users) and tens of thousands of folders.

The problem is that is an employee leaves, their files disappear if the account is deleted.

I am also unable to transfer files owned by other users to our new Shared Drive.

I have located the root folder and changed the ownership of that to my account. However, unlike Windows, the attributes aren’t inherited by child folders. This means that although my account ‘owns’ the root folder, it still doesn’t own all of the sub-folders or files.

I have been in touch with Google Support, and they advised that there are two options:

  • Manually transferring ownership of every file / folder. (They admitted this could take weeks.)
  • Using a ‘transfer ownership’ feature in the admin control panel. However, I would have to transfer the ownership of every file from a user’s account to my own, which I don’t want to do, as there will be tens of thousands of files that belong to them individually, their teams etc

The only options that I can think of are, using the sync tool to download all data locally, and then reupload using my account. The disadvantages of this are that

  • It’s fairly unfeasible for me to download and reupload 800GB of data
  • It will break the sharing permissions, and also Sheets that link to other Sheets will have their references broken as they will have new IDs

I am wondering if there is a third party tool that I can use that will allow me to select a folder, and apply ownership changes that will be inherited by all child folders?

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Check out GAM. It’s a command line tool that lets you automate tasks in G Suite. You can even script them in a batch file. Home · GAM-team/GAM Wiki · GitHub You’ll find the ACL commands here: Command Reference: Drive · GAM-team/GAM Wiki · GitHub Check out commands like "gam user update drivefileacl "

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BTW, if your admin account does not have the permissions needed to take ownership of the files, you’ll need to have GAM authenticate through a Service Account in a Google API project. How-to article here:

Conversely, you could also use this service account to move all the files and folders into a Shared Drive if that meets your needs. That is

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Really helpful - thank-you. This is the solution I was looking for.

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