Google Drive has been around for a long time, and if you, like me, regularly use Drive to store files, it’s probably pretty full by now.
One solution is to buy more storage space. As a commercial business, Google obviously prefers that you get your hands on your wallet. But another solution is to simply open another Google account (or use an existing one) and transfer the same amount of your old files to this Google Drive space. Then remove them from your main Drive account.
Google doesn’t offer convenient ways to do this, as they obviously want you to pay to get more storage. Simplifying this process will only hurt their bottom line. But there is a free method to manually transfer files wherever you want using Google Takeout
Google Takeout – Not a place to order pizza
When I hear the word “food to go,†I get hungry and think of pizza and Chinese. But Google Takeout really has nothing to do with food. Instead, it’s all about getting a copy of all your data at any time.
Google Takeout covers almost all the services it offers and you can download all the data that you entered into this service. Then you can move it wherever you want, or just save it to your computer as a backup. In this article, we’ll focus solely on Google Drive and move all of these files to another Drive account.
Get your files out of your Drive 1 account
First, log into the Drive account you want to move the files to.
Once you’ve done that, head over to the Google Archiver page (you may be asked to sign in again). Then you will see that each service is selected by default. So, at the top, click “Deselect all” to remove all of these marks.
Now scroll down to the “Drive” item and check the box to select it.
In the “Multiple Formats” section, select which formats you want to export your documents to. Ironically, you CANNOT export in Google Office format. This is the only major drawback to this. Unless you have a compelling reason to do this, I suggest leaving the default format suggested by Google.
By default, all the contents of the disk are selected, but if you only want to select folders, click All Disk Data Included and deselect the ones you don’t need. Please note that all files must be in a folder to export. Anything outside the folder will not be moved.
Now scroll to the bottom of the page and click Next Step.
In the next step, just leave the default options as they are. A download link will be emailed and you can download it as a zip archive.
Click Create Archive to get started.
It tells you that it may take hours or possibly days to get your archive, but like everything else, it depends on how much data we are talking about here. For my files on Yandex.Disk, an email with a download link came in ten minutes.
After clicking the “Download archive” button, you will be taken to the archive page with the “Download” button. Click on it to start downloading the zip file containing your files.
Put files in your Drive 2 account
After downloading the zip file, unzip it and you’ll see the folder structure just like your current Drive account.
Now log into the second Drive account (the one you will be using as your backup). In Drive, open the left menu and select Upload Folder.
Navigate to the folder on your computer with the exported files from Drive and watch them download to your new Drive account.
However, as I said, they will not show up as Google Office files. Rather, Microsoft files, PDFs, etc. In terms of storage space, this is rather inconvenient.
As far as I understand, the only way is to convert them to Google Office format individually by right-clicking each one and choosing “Open With Google Docs”. This will switch the format.
However, you can take your time doing this “as needed” as it will be tedious and time-consuming doing everything at once.
Deleting files from your Drive 1 account
If you moved files to a secondary account due to lack of space, it now makes sense to delete them from the first account. Don’t forget to empty your trash can as well, and now you have great extra space for even more files.
–