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Ask HN: Best practices for transferring ownership of Google Drive files?

1 points by paulcole ↗ HN
I work for a small company and am curious about best practices for transferring ownership of Google Drive files after an employee leaves. The options I have found are:

1 - Do nothing and don't delete the employee's email address. Only downside to this is continuing to pay for an unused email address.

2 - Change the old employee's sign in name and email address (username) to the new employee's. This should maintain ownership of all of those drive files? Are there any unforeseen issues with this?

3 - Transfer ownership of all the old employee's Google Drive Files & Folders to an employee who isn't leaving. There are lots of horror stories about this-- losing file structure, lost data, etc.

How have other people handled this? What's the best solution and what drawbacks are there?

2 comments

[ 205 ms ] story [ 3928 ms ] thread
brianjking
Are you using Google Apps for business (GCloud?) If so, you can transfer ownership that method. I've not heard anything about this causing issues, however, if you're concerned you could up your subscription to include Vault service?
paulcole
We are using GCloud, but that's the 3rd scenario I described above. There are stories about people losing the file structure and all transferred documents getting dumped into the new owner's root folder.

I'm thinking about using Google App Scripts to transfer all the folder ownerships and then cycle back through and transfer the file ownerships. But that might cause unknown problems. So far #2 is feeling like the best option (since we do not want to keep paying for an unused email address).