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Use cases → Documents and Drive

Migrate Drive data between teams with delegated access

Move shared Drive content for a whole team between organisational units or domains, preserving permissions and structure with a delegated service account.

Who it is forIT admins responsible for consolidating, splitting, or reorganising team Drives at scale.
APIsDrive API, Admin SDK
Typical scopesdrive, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Manual Drive migrations are slow, error-prone, and do not scale for teams or org units. Bulk copying often breaks sharing links, loses permissions, or leaves orphaned files, especially when moving between domains or OU boundaries.

How it works

  1. Enumerate all users and shared Drives in the source team using Admin SDK.
  2. For each Drive, use the delegated service account to list and export the full file tree and permissions.
  3. Recreate the folder structure and permissions in the target environment, mapping users as needed.
  4. Transfer file ownership and migrate content, verifying completion and access at each step.

What changes

Drive contents and sharing settings are migrated in bulk, with accurate permissions and folder structures, minimising manual work and user disruption.

The trap in this one. Drive API's 'copy' method does not preserve comments, activity history, or folder-level permissions, only file-level sharing. If you rely on 'add file shortcut' to preserve structure, expect silent failures when shortcuts point to files outside the destination domain or when shortcut limits are hit (e.g. 500 per Drive). These failures are not surfaced in the API response and only appear as missing files post-migration.

Questions people ask

Can I migrate shared Drives between domains?

Yes, but user and group permissions must be mapped to the new domain, and some sharing links will break if external sharing isn't configured identically.

Does this process migrate file owners?

Ownership can only be transferred to users within the target domain—files owned by external accounts will remain with the source unless explicitly copied and reassigned.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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