Transfer Google Drive Files Ownership Between Users

It’s sometimes necessary to transfer file ownership in Google Drive from one user to another. The typical use case for this is when someone is leaving an organisation and it’s part of your Google Workspace offboarding process. Although, there are also many other reasons this may happen, such as when a co-worker is on vacation and they are the owner of an important document that needs approvals, sharing and general management. When a Google Drive file is owned by a single Google Workspace user they can sometimes become the bottleneck of a process, and things can quickly grind to a halt if they are away from work for any reason. Transferring ownership of a file or folder structure in a user’s Google Drive could be the quickest and simplest way of unblocking that bottleneck and allowing other team members to share the load.

Transfer Ownership with Patronum

Within Patronum you can transfer ownership of Google Drive files from one Google Workspace user to another, and unlike the Google Workspace Admin Console, you don’t need to transfer all files. Patronum allows you to select specific files to be transferred. So if you just need to transfer ownership of a single file from one person to another Patronum makes this process super easy.

Within Patronum simply locate the specific user that currently owns the file, and perform a file search of their Google Drive directly within Patronum. Once you’ve located the file you can simply change the ownership to another user. You can also transfer ownership of a whole Google Drive Folder, including files not owned by the original user. This is useful when you want to hand over a project folder to a single individual in order for them to collate and share with a client etc.

If you’re looking to transfer all files we recommend that instead of transferring files to another user, it’s better if you transferred the data into a Google Shared Drive. Patronum allows you to transfer Google Drive Files to a Google Shared Drive as part of an offboarding process.

Share Google Drive Files with others.

Sometimes, changing ownership may not be completely necessary but instead you simply want to share a specific file with another user. And again Patronum has you covered, just search for the file, select Share and you can view, edit and add additional collaborators to the file, making it easy for users to continue working when colleagues are not available or are on vacation.

Search Google Drive Files

But what if you don’t know who the owner of a specific file is? If you know the name or even better the file Id of the Google Drive file you can use Patronum’s powerful Google Drive Search feature. With DRIVE SEARCH you can locate files across all users and Shared Google Drives within seconds. Search by Name, File Id, and even internal and externally owned files. Patronum makes it easy to locate and manage Google Drive files.

If you’re not using Patronum schedule a demo for learn more.

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