Transfer Google Drive to a Shared Drive for leavers

When someone leaves your organisation it’s important to be able to retain the great work they have done for you. This work often comes in the form of Google Drive documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. The first thing you need to make sure of is that you have a Google Workspace backup of your user’s data. However, a backup is not the solution when it comes to business as usual. Files and Documents that have been shared need to remain within the Google Workspace environment. Deleting a user will remove these files, and could cause huge disruption within your organisation. Google provides you with the ability within the Google Admin Console to “Transfer Google Drive files to a new owner“. This is a manual task that an administrator needs to do, with the common practice being the transfer of Google Drive files to a “service account” which is typically a Google Workspace account specifically created for the storing of ex-employees files. The downside of this approach is that if your users need access to a file that they have received the link for, their request for access will go to the service account which may not be actively monitored, effectively sending the users’ request for access into a black hole. To solve this issue you can transfer the files to a Google Shared Drive.

Transfer Google Drive files with Patronum

With Patronum you can create an offboarding policy that can either transfer this important data to a line manager or better still, transfer the data to a centrally controlled Google Shared Drive.

Within a Patronum policy simply select the FILES section, select the deprovision options and then select Transfer all files to Shared Drive. Now whenever a user is flagged for offboarding the policy will automatically transfer their data to a Google Shared Drive.

Notes.

1. When transferring ownership of files to a Google Shared Drive, the Shared Drive must be owned by the organisation.
2. Within the Policy make sure you change the password of the user and force a sign-out. This prevents new content from being created or moved during the transfer.
3. Trashed files are not transferred.
4. To create an offboarding policy simply follow the instructions within help.patronum.io.