Need to change drive ownership from user not registered in our domain

[danieldibono]

Over time, we had drive files and folders shared with users in not in our domain. We had them register their external email with Google so we can share with them (usually consultants that were just uploading files to us temporarily for a project). 

Today we are trying to send these files and folders to a company that acquired us. We have created an account with Google Drive so the company can use their Sharegate tool to login to that account see all the files and download them to their side. Account for example, (PII Removed by Staff).

Our issue is that if the ownership of those files are not of file.transfer.yamana.com, sharegate will not see those files. 

If I try the following:

• Go to the file/folder, click on share
• Click on (PII Removed by Staff) it will not allow me to transfer the ownership
• I cannot login to the owners account to transfer the ownership either because as I mentioned they are not a registered user in our domain, just an external address registered to google
• I tried GAM and it didn't work because the error is account not found which makes sense since the ownership is tied to an external email not in our domain.

In summary: has anyone run into this issue when ownership is tied to an external address rather than one within your primary domain? if so, how did you get the ownership transferred.

Any feedback if you have been through this is appreciated. 

[icrew]

This issue comes up absolutely all the time in Higher Education where folks collaborate across institutional boundaries all the time (e.g., multinstitutional research projects). It's not fun, and there honestly aren't any really good solutions. It's one of the most-broken things about Google MyDrive, and Google has known about and refused to fix it for pretty much as long as Google Drive has existed.

Rant over, a couple of thoughts:

1) In MyDrive, you could make a copy of the documents instead of changing ownership. There are techniques using GAM to do this--I'd suggest asking pretty much your original question on the GAM mailing list (https://groups.google.com/g/google-apps-manager) and see what advice you get.

2) Check out the thread at https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Change-ownership-in-drive/m-p/599086 which offers a number of helpful suggestions, especially if you can get the outside folks that own the documents to help out.

3) Going forward, one of the best things about Shared Drives as opposed to MyDrive is that the ownership model is actually sensible: all files in a Shared Drive are owned by the Shared Drive itself (and by extension by the Workspace instance that that Shared Drive was created in). Doesn't help anything today, but it might in the future.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[danieldibono]

After speaking with Google Workspace Support they recommended the following:

• copy the entire data set you need to change ownership, locally
• bring the data up to a temp account in Google
• use Google Workspace ownership transfer utility to transfer from that temp account back to the main (PII Removed by Staff)

Specifically, they recommended using Google TakeOut.

Here is the challenge with that. When you download anything bigger than 50GB it will start to create separate zip files which completely disorganizes the final product.

Therefore, now I am looking to see how to organize multiple zip file exports from Google take out.

[icrew]

Yeah, a copy within Drive seems a lot easier than exporting, organizing, and re-uploading. For example, with GAMADV, you can do:

gam <who> copy drivefile <DriveFileEntity> [newfilename <DriveFileName>] [recursive] [parentid <DriveFolderID>] [parentname <DriveFolderName>]

See https://github.com/taers232c/GAMADV-XTD3/wiki/Users-Drive-Copy-Move#copy-files-and-folders for all the details.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[danieldibono]

That looks promising but based on the documentation the gam command only copies within Google. How do you modify the syntax to copy the files locally to the computer?

[icrew]

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood! I didn't realize you were wanting to copy things down to the local computer. 

In that case, I might have a look at rclone: https://rclone.org/drive/ (also command-line like GAM, but focused around copying files).

Apologies for the misunderstanding!

[danieldibono]

That was my initial plan but after research I found this link.

https://github.com/taers232c/GAMADV-XTD3/wiki/Users-Drive-Ownership#transfer-ownership-of-files-that...

Apparently you can transfer ownership and files to a specific destination. I can't seem to get the synx right though and can't find any good examples of users doing this with actual command. This site doesn't given examples, just syntax.

[icrew]

Ask on the GAM mailing list that I mentioned in my first reply above—odds are good you’ll hear back from someone (often Ross Scroggs, the author of GAM advanced) quite quickly…