How to move a folder from My Drive to Shared Drive
Google Drive makes it possible for you to move items from My Drive to a Shared Drive. This can be especially useful if you need to share a large number of files with your colleagues or if you need to collaborate on a project.
But there are a few things to keep in mind:
To allow users within your company to move files they don't own, you need to enable the option "Allow users to migrate files to Shared Drives".
Files or folders belonging to an external user cannot be moved, even by an administrator. When you attempt to move a folder containing files owned by external users, Google will instead generate shortcuts for those folders/files.
File access might be altered during the move process.
Let's examine these in more detail in this article.
How to move a folder to a Shared Drive if you are not an admin or not a Shared Drive manager ?
That’s possible using Folgo's “Move to Shared Drive” feature (it’s still preferable to have the option “Allow users to migrate files to shared drives” activated on your Google Workspace domain).
There are two ways of being able to copy folders to Shared Drives either you are an admin or you are a manager of a Shared Drive, we will see both cases below:
Admin role
An admin role is necessary if you want to allow users to move files they don’t own to Shared Drives
To perform this last task:
In the admin console, go to Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Migration Settings
Enable Allow users to migrate files to shared drives
💡This setting can be implemented domain-wide, or only for specific groups or Organizational Units.
⚠️ If you activate this option an editor will able to move a file he does not own without the owner being notified
Learn more about the admin role.
Unmovable items
When a file or a folder is owned by an external user, it is considered unmovable. If an item cannot be moved to a Shared Drive, a shortcut to this item will be created while the original item will be moved to its owner’s My Drive.
⚠️ When the number of unmovable items exceed 25 items or 10% of the total number of items, the folder move is rejected.
Shared Drive manager
In a Shared Drive, there are 4 roles: viewer, contributor, content manager, and manager. The first three can not move folders, but recently Google added the option for managers who are not admins to do so.
To become a manager in a Shared Drive you need to ask either someone who already is one or an admin of your domain.
Once you are a manager, you can just right-click on any of your folders, and select the "move to" option, select the desired destination and you are all good.
💡This setting can be implemented domain-wide, or only for specific groups or Organizational Units.
⚠️ If you activate this option an editor will able to move a file he does not own without the owner being notified
Learn more about the admin role.
Recap of what you can with Google already existing features
The yes column of "User has admin rights" is the same if the user is a Shared Drive manager, however if he is not he just cannot do anything
* A shortcut will be created.
** Only if the option “Allow users to migrate files to Shared Drives” is enabled.
Note :
If you have the "Allow editors to move files into shared drives" activated it will work the same for editors and owners of a folder or file.
How to move any file to a Shared Drive, even external files?
Folgo’s “Move to Shared Drive” feature gives you several options to handle unmovable items: create a shortcut, create a copy of the file or send a move request to the owner!
The last option even works with external owners, meaning that with Folgo all files are movable to Shared Drives, without restriction. With Folgo, a move is never rejected, even if the quantity of unmovable items exceeds 25 or 10%. You do not need to ba a manager of the Shared Drive.
Folgo also provides an email report before moving a folder with the list of file owners and the number of files that are not directly movable by you.
Content access changes
You may notice significant changes to the content's access when moving a folder from My Drive to a Shared Drive. This can be due to restrictive permissions. Indeed, permissions within Shared Drive are inherently expansive. For example, if a user has access to a folder in a Shared Drive, he will necessarily have access to all of its content (subfolders and files). Besides, if he has Editor access on this specific folder, his rights cannot be reduced to Viewer on one of the subfolders. However, a user can have increased access to some items, like being Commenter on a folder and Editor on one of its subfolders.
Folgo’s Inspect and Analyze feature is really useful in preventing content access changes, especially when dealing with restrictive permissions.
If you perform a scan of your folder before moving it to your Shared Drive, you will be able to easily identify problematic items through the dedicated column of the report and have the chance to rearrange it to fit Shared Drive’s requirements.
Learn more about our Inspect and Analyze feature.
Other limitations
Shared Drives have a limit of 20 levels of nested folders. Folgo will let you know before the move if you exceed this limit.
