"A complete set of customer estimates created by a colleague who left last month is nowhere to be found. They should have been shared, but as soon as the person's account was deactivated, we couldn't open them." We received this consultation from a company with about 30 employees. The cause was simple: the files resided on the former employee's My Drive and were merely "shared" with other team members. The owner of a shared file remains the individual who created it. If that individual's account is deleted or suspended, the shared files disappear along with it.
Files that should be corporate assets end up scattered as personal belongings of employees. This is a silent risk noticed only after an incident occurs. Google Workspace offers a mechanism specifically designed to solve this structure: shared drives. However, dumping every file in blindly will scramble permissions and introduce new chaos. Let's look at why and how to migrate, starting from the single core question: "Who owns the files?"
The critical difference between My Drive and shared drives
The difference between the two lies not in the number of features, but in who owns the files. The owner of a file stored in My Drive is the individual who created it; other members are merely "shared recipients." In contrast, the owner of a file stored in a shared drive is not an individual, but the organization (team).
| My Drive | Shared Drive | |
|---|---|---|
| File owner | Individual creator | Organization (team) |
| When creator resigns or is deleted | Shared files risk being lost | Files remain intact |
| Approach to access permissions | Individuals configure sharing per file | Members and permissions managed uniformly per drive |
This single distinction is the root cause of lost files and omitted handovers during employee resignations and internal transfers. With shared drives, even if a member leaves and their account is deleted, files placed there continue to exist as organizational assets. While specific offboarding steps are covered in How to Properly Close Accounts of Departing Employees, having your assets on shared drives in the first place significantly alleviates the concern that files will get caught in offboarding fallout.
Why "just sharing it" isn't enough
We often hear people say, "It's fine because we shared it with the team." However, sharing merely means the owner is lending view or edit privileges to someone else. Once the lender (= the creator) is gone, those borrowed rights are left in limbo. Furthermore, only the individual knows who has access to which file and to what degree, leaving administrators blind to the complete picture. As a result, critical ledgers end up existing solely on a specific person's drive, causing widespread dependency where nobody can touch the file if that person takes time off.
Another pitfall is bulk processing during offboarding. When suspending or deleting accounts, handling files owned by that individual incorrectly can wipe out materials used in daily operations. Although administrators have workflows to transfer file ownership to another person, high volume makes omissions likely, and you end up having to start by auditing "what files they actually owned" in the first place. Storing them in shared drives from the start makes this task entirely unnecessary.
The migration pitfall: permission overwrites
Does this mean you should simply move everything into shared drives? That is where the greatest trap lies. Sharing permissions configured granularly per file in My Drive are replaced by drive-level permission rules when moved to a shared drive. In other words, a customized setting like "this file was only shown to the accounting department" can suddenly become visible to all members of the destination drive.
This is why migration is never just "drag the folder and you're done." You must first design how to segment your shared drives. Decide how to divide your storage containers according to business realities—by department, project, or confidentiality level—and specify who gets which role (Viewer, Editor, Manager) in each before migrating content. Failing to follow this order will not only disrupt storage and information hygiene, but actively create incidents where confidential data becomes visible to unauthorized personnel. If you want to organize how confidential files are managed and located, considering this alongside AI Classification, Labels, and DLP Design for Drive will elevate governance while you migrate.
Migration steps to master as a client
Whether you outsource migration or handle it in-house, the key decisions that determine project success as a client take shape in the following sequence.
First is visualizing current status: identifying whose My Drive holds which business assets, and in what volume. In particular, isolating "critical files owned by only one person" forms the foundation for prioritization. Second is container design: deciding how many shared drives to create, along what boundaries, and what access permissions each should hold. This accounts for 80% of migration project quality. Third is migration and verification: actually moving the files and thoroughly verifying that "people who should have access can open them, while those who shouldn't cannot." Neglecting permissions after migrating is the most common failure mode.
Please note that moving everything to shared drives does not reduce overall storage usage. Files in shared drives still consume the organization's pooled storage. Because it is efficient to audit unnecessary files during migration, use the visualization steps from How to Fix Storage Crunches in parallel. If you are in early adoption without established operational rules, revisiting the initial architecture from the Complete Google Workspace Implementation Guide is ultimately your fastest route.
Where to begin
The first step you should take is to ask yourself seriously: "If one key person in our company left today, where are the files that would bring our operations to a halt?" If the answer points to a specific person's My Drive, those are the assets to prioritize moving to shared drives. Whether you leave corporate assets in individual hands or redesign them as organizational property—the longer you postpone this decision, the greater the damage when resignations or transfers occur.
How to segment shared drives, design permissions, and migrate without breaking existing sharing settings: the ideal balance varies depending on your company's departmental structure and confidentiality levels. From assessing your current status to establishing post-migration operational rules, we help build an incident-free process together.
