Table of contents
Collect the questions Workspace admins ask in public forums and one wins by a wide margin: how do I move files from My Drive to a shared drive without breaking anything? Roughly a third of the people asking never get an answer.
Why this matters at all
A file in My Drive belongs to a person. When that person leaves and the account is deleted, the files go with it unless someone transfers them first. In a shared drive the owner is the organisation. People come and go, files stay.
What happens to links
Good news: the file ID does not change. Moving a file to a shared drive keeps its link working. Documents that embed the link keep working too.
Bad news: access changes, and not in one simple way. Someone who loses access still gets a link that resolves, lands on a request-access page, and reports “the link is broken”. Someone who keeps direct access may be a partner you meant to cut off. Both are permissions problems, and they cause almost every complaint.
| Who had access in My Drive | After the move to a shared drive |
|---|---|
| Shared on the file directly (internal or external) | Keeps it, unless the drive’s settings forbid that kind of access |
| Had access through a shared parent folder | Loses it, unless they are a member of the shared drive |
| Member of the shared drive, no previous access | Gains access according to their drive role |
| Anyone with the link | Depends on the drive’s link-sharing settings; check it |
The correct order
- Write down who has access today: directly shared, through folders, and outside the organisation. This is the list you test against afterwards.
- Create the shared drive and add members first. Not after. Move files before adding people and the calls start immediately.
- Check who can move. By default you can move files you own into a shared drive where you are at least a Contributor. Moving folders, or files owned by someone else, needs the admin to allow it in the Drive sharing settings, or an admin with the required Drive privileges. Files owned by someone who already left need to be transferred to a live account first.
- Move folders, not individual files. Structure survives and the result is easier to verify.
- Do not use “Add shortcut”. A shortcut points to the original file and does not transfer ownership. A year later nobody remembers where the original lives.
- Test with a regular user account, not with the account that did the move. The mover is normally a Manager of the drive and sees everything in it; a Viewer, a Commenter and an external partner see something else.
The traps almost everyone hits
- Files shared with external collaborators. If the drive forbids outside access, the partner loses it the moment the file lands. If it allows it, the partner keeps access you may not have intended. Decide before the move, then check.
- Google Forms responses. A form and its response sheet are two files. Move them together, submit a test response and confirm it arrives. Check any script attached to the sheet too; scripts run as a specific user.
- Item limits. A shared drive holds at most 500,000 items: files, folders, shortcuts and the bin all count. Split a big archive by department or project.
At scale
A few thousand files: the Drive web interface is fine. Tens of thousands: you want the Admin console migration tools or Drive API scripting, because mistakes at that scale are expensive to undo. File structure and the permission model are part of a proper Workspace setup. An hour of planning beats a week of repairs.
Checked against Google’s Drive documentation on 10 September 2026.
Planning a move to shared drives? We map ownership and permissions first, pilot with one team and test the agreed access after the move. Book a free 30-minute audit or call +371 22 30 50 90.
