In this video, I'll share my process for moving files and changing ownership from one Google Drive account to another. This is particularly useful when trying to move files out of a closed system like a school or work domain.

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**** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ****

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my process for moving files and changing ownership from one Google Drive account to another. This is particularly useful when trying to move files out of a closed system like a school or work domain.

I recently graduated from a masters degree program and was told, unsurprisingly, that I would lose access to my school Google Account about 4 weeks after classes ended. I was pretty much expecting this, but after 4 years saving documents and spreadsheets to the school's Google Drive account, I had a lot of documents that I didn't want to lose. So, the question was, what is the best way to transfer all of these school documents out of my school account and into my personal account? Clearly, the easiest thing would be to share all of those documents with my personal account. The problem? If the owner for the document is my school Google account and that account went away, would the documents go away too? Probably, so really I needed to change ownership.

In some cases, you can do this easily -- if the two account share the same domain -- for example gmail.com. First you
- Share the documents with the NEW account. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to refer to them as the old and new account. Select multiple documents, right click, choose Share, and type in the email address of the new account. Once you've done that, you can
- Switch ownership to new account. Again, select multiple files, right click, hit Share, click on the drop down box by the new account email address and choose Make Owner. Voila!

But what happens if you want to change ownership between two accounts with different domains? In my case, the old one is vcu.edu and the new was gmail.com. If you follow the steps just outlined, you'll get an error message that says, "Sorry, you can't transfer ownership to someone outside of your organization." Transferring ownership is more complicated in this situation. Here's what I did:
- Log into Old account - First, I log into the old Google Drive account. Next I
- Create a new folder - and share it with the new account. Now
- Move all files to this folder - Any file that you want to change ownership for, move into this new shared folder. Now that you have all of your files in the same place,
- Log into the New account - you should be able to see the folder that has been shared with you from the old account. This is good, but again, I worry that once the old account goes away, these files will all disappear. So,
- Create a new folder - in your new account. This folder will be owned by the new account. Now,
- Make copies of files in the shared folder - Do this by selecting all files, right clicking, and hitting Make Copy. Now, you are going to
- Move all copies to the new folder - You can do this easily by sorting the list by the name of the file by hitting this arrow up here. Since all of the copies will now have "Copy of" appended to the start of the file name, they are all clumped together. Select all of them and drag them to the new folder or right click and select Move to put them into the new folder that you created.

So now you have a new folder (that you own) filled with all of your files -- which are all owned by the new account. So, when that old account eventually goes away, you will still have these files. The only issue is that every single file name is preceded by "Copy of." Believe me, I spent a good long time trying to figure out how to bulk change file names, but determined in the end that it wasn't worth the effort since I was just keeping these for posterity and how often was I really going to have to access, for example, my 15 page paper on the social work implications of pay day loans? So, does it really matter if that file has "Copy of" in front of the title? Not really. If you do know a good way to do this, let us all know in the comments.

And let me know what you think! Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

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