Google Drive To Cloud Storage

Google Drive to Cloud Storage: Practical Migration Without Losing Functionality

Teams relying on Google Drive eventually hit limits—be it integration challenges, compliance requirements, or simply needing more granular controls. The migration path isn’t a checkbox task. Handling file ownership, preserving metadata, and maintaining collaborative workflows require a methodical approach.

Rationale for Leaving Google Drive

Common drivers:

• Integration Mandate: Moving into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem for Teams and Outlook alignment.
• Cost Containment: S3's tiered pricing or Backblaze B2’s flat rates beat out per-user fees, at scale.
• Regulatory Demand: Data residency (GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA) often rules out multinational SaaS defaults.
• Security/Auditing: Box and Egnyte deliver threaded audit logs—Google Drive’s audit API is limited.

1. Audit: What’s in Your Drive?

Blind migration introduces trouble—broken share links, orphaned Google Sheets, access regressions.

Typical audit rundown:

# List all files in Drive with owner, last modified date, and size
gdrive list --query "trashed = false" --fields "id,name,owners,emailAddress,modifiedTime,size"

• File Inventory: Classify by type—Office formats, images, raw binaries, native Google formats.
• Permission Matrix: Export sharing configs (drive audit log from admin console or third-party tools).
• Versioning: Google Docs versioning isn’t 1:1 portable—expect some loss or plan manual export if legal retention is in play.
• Externals: Locate external collaborators before cut-off.

Note: Google Vault can export full user data, but doesn’t convert cloud-native docs automatically.

2. Choosing a Target Platform: Know the Trade-offs

Evaluate:

• Bulk API Support for automation.
• Retention and Activitiy Logging—critical for industries where audit trails are non-negotiable.
• Link Behaviors: Download vs. live-edit? S3, B2, etc. can’t handle browser-based collaboration natively.

3. Data Export: Beyond Google Takeout

Manual export breaks hierarchy, metadata, and can bloat conversion.

• Google Docs, Sheets, Slides: Export to Office formats. Google Takeout bundles these as PDFs by default—a non-starter for editing.

  Automation:

  # Requires Google Drive API enabled and service account creds.
  from googleapiclient.discovery import build
  service = build('drive', 'v3', credentials=creds)
  file_id = 'abc123'
  request = service.files().export_media(fileId=file_id, mimeType='application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document')
  

• Folder Hierarchy Preservation:
  Takeout produces flat .zip folders. Preservation requires tooling—see below.

Gotcha: Shared drives ("Team Drives") need separate handling. Some tools choke on them.

4. Migration Tools: Automation and Pitfalls

Manual drag-and-drop is an invitation for data loss and missing ACLs.

• CloudFuze: Handles most major platforms. Preserves permissions, but has glitchy handling on files >10GB (as of v3.1, March 2024).
• Mover.io: For Google Drive ↔︎ OneDrive. Chain transfer in ~20TB/day blocks, but must be initiated with adequate Office 365 admin permissions.
• rclone: Swiss army knife for DevOps.
  Example (full sync):

  rclone sync gdrive:SharedFolder onedrive:MainArchive --drive-shared-with-me
  

  Watch for 403: Rate Limit Exceeded errors—use --tpslimit 5 to throttle.

Side note: No tool fully maps nested permissions from Google to any target. Manual intervention is inevitable for complex sharing trees.

5. Permissions & Collaboration Mapping

No migration tool today flawlessly ports Google Drive's nuanced sharing (domain-level access, comment-only links) elsewhere.

• Export User Access Lists:

  gdrive sharing list --id {folder/file_id}
  

• Bulk Notify Participants: Use scripts to email new URLs or map group permissions to AD equivalents.
• Manual Re-share Required: After import, re-share sensitive docs and set group membership appropriately. Update referenced file links in docs, wikis, and templates—broken links are almost guaranteed.

Known issue: Office 365 throttles share emails—expect delays with >500 invites.

6. Cutover: Test, Validate, and Monitor

Never decommission Google Drive abruptly.

• Sample Access Tests:
  • Can external partners open shared folders?
  • Is file version history intact or at least retrievable?
  • Is multifactor auth enforced for the new storage?
• Permission Escalation Checks: Users often get excessive rights post-migration. Review with audits or simulated user sessions.
• Data integrity: File sizes and md5 hashes should match; otherwise, re-export.

Maintain parallel access (read-only on Google) for at least 30 days. Keep an immutable off-site backup in case last-minute data recovery is needed.

Example: Google Drive → OneDrive, 2024

Midsize consulting firm faced with retiring all G Suite licenses after M365 rollout.

Sequence:

1. Inventory (10TB, mixed Office, PDF, and 8,000 Google Docs).
2. Exported Google Docs via API; batch converted to .docx for OneDrive compatibility.
3. Used rclone v1.64 (--drive-acknowledge-abuse, --cutoff-mode=soft) to transfer, with TPM (Trusted Platform Module)-backed authentication for programmatic access.
4. Rebuilt permission hierarchy by mapping Google Groups to AD, using a PowerShell script.
5. Staggered user transition over two weekends; provided a Just-in-Time FAQ wiki for migration blockers.
6. Retained Google Vault for 3 months post-migration for compliance and legal hold.

Side effect: Some complex Google Sheets scripts became read-only; workaround was to re-implement core logic in Excel macros. Not ideal, but sufficient given business constraints.

Migration—Done Right

Cloud storage migration, especially from a SaaS like Google Drive, has rough edges: incomplete migration of comments, broken references, and limited parity for real-time collaboration. Yet with tooling, staged communication, and explicit permission validations, most pain can be controlled.

Non-obvious tip: For high-stakes moves, spin up the target storage in a shadow IT tenant for testing, isolated from production users. Catch surprises here, not on Day 1.

Audit before, automate with caution, always validate. The path off Google Drive isn’t perfect, but with deliberate engineering, it’s repeatable.