Sharing Ownership of Files in Google Drive

So if you are about to depart UWCSEA, you will need to remember to leave your important Google Documents behind. Behind the scenes your school GMail account is eventually turned off and moved to an archive state in the months after you leave. When this occurs any document or resource that you have created, uploaded and therefore owned within your Google Drive will disappear.

If you have shared and uploaded resources into shared department account you will need to shift ownership of these before your leave... so that your legacy of documents will live on.

Step 1 - Search your Google Drive using the following command.

Use the search bar within Google Drive to filter for documents that you own, but have shared with another account or have uploaded into folders within another account.

From: your account
To: department account

Example: (be careful about the gaps)
from:anm@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg to:doverhsbusandecon@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg

Step 2 - Select the files that you wish to change ownership

You can hold down the shift key and then select multiple files at once. The grey text next to the file name points to the folder where these files are currently located. These folders will be within the Google Drive account that you searched with above.

Step 3 - Click on the Sharing Button to change ownership

Now you can choose to make a different account the owner of the resources. As shown below, you will need to find the departmental account and then change this permissions from Can Edit to Is Owner. Once you press save the permissions will be alters.

(A word of Caution - be careful about selecting too many documents at once to change permissions. From experience 20-30 at once is ok, but after this the process slows down or even stops.)

Step 4 - Final Check

You can now do the same search as Step 1 and see a reduced list of documents. The resources you once owned will still be in the same folder location, but now owned by the departmental Google account. You can also use this process to shift ownership of files which are using up a lot of space in your personal account. Remember you have a 30GB personal limit for files that you own.