Migrating Workspace domain to personal Google account

[niroooo]

Hi, does anyone have experience of migrating a Workspace account to a personal Google account?

I run my personal domain through Google Workspace and have done since the days of Google Apps Free Edition. We have a couple of Workspace email accounts which are purely for personal use. We don't conduct any business whatsoever on the Workspace account (how did I end up here?). I am finding it increasingly difficult to manage some Nest Smart Home devices using the Workspace email and finding in counter intuitive to manage these with an extra Gmail account.

Google clearly aren't accommodating personal users on Workspace accounts. I get that, it's a business service just a shame they didn't make this clear when promoting Google Apps Free Edition.

I'm at the point now where I'm considering the following:

1 - Backup Google Workspace data and delete Workspace account

2- Setup third-party email hosting and re-configure DNS

3- Setup personal Google accounts using custom emails

4- Create new Google Smart Home and re-register smart home devices (Doorbell, Thermostat, Nest Cams, Speakers, etc.)

5- Subscribe to Google One plan for extra photo storage (A friend has managed this using his ISP email)

6- Transfer Nest Aware subscription (currently assigned to free Gmail) to new Google Account

My main reservation is whether my custom emails will register as personal Google accounts and if so, will my Nest devices work with these new accounts? I will test this beforehand using another custom domain but wanted to see if anyone else had gone down this route.

[cryptochrome]

I am in the same boat with my personal account and have been contemplating this step for years, literally. On the surface level, it seems easy enough, but the deeper you dig, and the longer you've had everything in your Workspace account, the more complicated it gets. 

While transferring emails to another account isn't much of a problem, the issue begin with everything related to things you ever bought (think Play Store, Youtube Premium, Youtube data like watch history, subscriptions etc, everything you have on Google Maps etc. pp). If you have a 20+ year collection of photos in Google Photos, that's another nightmare. There just aren't any options to migrate the data, services and subscriptions, and everything they entail. 

Google Takeout is great to get your data out, but you can't import it into another account. So that isn't an option either. 

I am at the point of just getting used to the fact that I can't migrate everything and start from scratch with some things. 

Generally, your plan seems sound. Get a Google One subscription with a lot of storage, and start migrating stuff where possible. 

Using custom domains with personal Google accounts is possible, easily (you just need an email forwarder). 

[niroooo]

Thanks, likewise I have been holding out for Google to change their policies or at least create a practical migration path for personal domains. While some of the assistant features have been made available on Workspace, on the the whole it's still a messy situation!

[DavidDS]

Photos can be easily migrated by setting up Partner Sharing to your free Gmail address. Then configure your new Photos settings to save all shared photos to storage. They won't take up any space all the time the original account exists, but will when the original is deleted. 

This gets around the headache of using Takeout with Google Photos which, for some inexplicable reason, removes most of the metadata from the photos - most importantly the datetime stamp - so that reimporting them completely messes up the timeline.  

[niroooo]

Thanks for the tip, just getting round to trying Partner Sharing with the free Gmail account.

I have shared Workspace photos (14GB) to a free Gmail account and then under the settings of the free Gmail account have enabled "Save to your account". The photos are all visible in the free Gmail account and in chronological order 🙂

Storage is still 0 B of 15 GB used. Is it just case of waiting a few hours/days for the photos to physically transfer into the free Gmail account?

[ajojose33333344]

By using takeout we can get the data out, the other drive data, and things you can download and upload but mail will be in  .mbox format, usually, to migrate .mbox we use thunderbird, you can try using the same.

[niroooo]

Mail & Drive are relatively straight forward to transfer. Play store subscriptions, purchases, saved maps, smart home device settings will require hours of manual work and some data loss is inevitable.

[chemenway]

You can import .mbox emails directly into Apple Mail, if that’s an option.

[chemenway]

I have had the same issue for years! It was always just too time-consuming to sort out what was going on and how to fix it. Apparently I have both a G-Suite and Workspace business account and have for years (How? Who knows?). PLUS a personal Google One account that I use all the time. The former two are billed monthly and separately to this day (May 2024).

I’ve spent the last THREE HOURS trying to access help and figure out how to quit Workspace (whose features I NEVER used for my business) while making sure my business domain emails (domain with Network Solutions / NetSol) can be forwarded to the G-Suite account or my personal Google One account (preferable), and how to export all the other data. The Workspace account is under my business domain name (I think) which is how I log in as a Super Admin. The G-Suite account is under my personal gmail, as is my Google One account.

For the life of me, I cannot find the supposed “Get Help” option in my Admin console(s), so I have not been able to get any help AT ALL. Or call anyone. So here I am, searching in the forums. This is so frustrating - and getting expensive!

Like the OP, I’m getting ready to migrate everything I can out (somewhere) and just cancel Workspace outright and fix issues afterwards. OR provide a payment method that doesn’t work. (that’s one way to get attention!)

I hope everyone got their issues addressed by now. Off I go into the wilderness from here again … Sigh