Google DIY Guides

Transfer your Gmail and Drive with Google Takeout for Schools

You can take it with you! Transfer your Gmail and Drive with Google Takeout for Schools

Change is a part of life:

In each situation, it is very possible you may have a Google account. G Suite may be used at your high school, your college, and any one of your jobs.

So what happens to your Google account when you graduate high school, graduate college, move from one job to another, and eventually retire? You will have built up years of emails, documents, slideshows, and much more. Is there an easy way to take all those files and all that data with you? What would be great would be a simple tool to copy all of your files to a different Google account (such as your personal Gmail account).

Well, thankfully we have that with Google Takeout for Schools. This is a very simple and free tool that will copy the emails and Drive files from your school account over to either a personal Gmail account or another G Suite for Education account. See below for a video demonstrating all the steps, as well as written direction on the process.


Tutorial Video (9 minutes)




Directions for Copying Gmail and Drive

For the first step you need to have two different Google accounts, the source account that you are copying from and the destination account that you are copying to. The source account, the one you are copying from, has to be a G Suite for Education account, which is your school account. The destination account, the one you are copying to, can be any kind of Google account, including a personal Gmail account or another education account at a different school.

You will need to log into both accounts to copy your files. You can log into the accounts on different devices, or on the same device. For example, if you are using a laptop you could click your account picture in the top right corner and choose to "Add another account". Or you could click on your profile button above that and click the "Manage people" gear where you can then add the second account as it one separate profile. There are many other ways to log into both accounts, so whatever works for you is fine.


Please note to use the full address. If you leave "transfer" off the end you will go to a different Google Takeout site that is used to download your files, rather than copy them to a new account. We will take a quick look at that other site later in the post.











Your emails and Drive files will now begin copying over to your other account. Depending on how many files you have, it may take up to a week for everything to get copied. You can close out of this window now if you want because all of the copying is happening on Google's servers.



When the copy process is done we will now find the emails and files in your other account.





Please note: The emails and Drive files are all just copies of the originals. The original emails and files are still in your school account


Directions for Downloading Other Content

So what about content that is not an email or a Drive file? For example Calendar events or contacts or Google Photos or Google Keep notes. Unfortunately, the transfer tool only works for emails and Drive files. However, there is another version of Google Takeout that will let you download copies of other content to your local computer, rather than copying it to a new account.





Directions for G Suite Administrators

As a quick note for G Suite Administrators, you do need to make sure Google Takeout is enabled for your users and that they are allowed to share files outside of your domain, for these tools to work.

To make sure Google Takeout is turned on:


To make sure your users are allowed to share files outside of your domain:



So whether you are a graduating student or a retiring teacher, or anyone moving to a new school, Google Takeout for Schools is an easy and free tool to use to copy your email and Drive files over to a new account, as well as to download copies of other data you may want to keep.


Post by Eric Curts. Connect with me on Twitter at twitter.com/eric
https://www.controlaltachieve.com/2020/05/google-takeout.html