This one is long, but if you or your students are leaving Londonderry School District - it is important!!
As we move closer to June, some of you (and your students) may be concerned about what happens to your Google account if you leave Londonderry School District. Your account will remain for a little while, but then it will be deactivated and then deleted.
Luckily, Google offers a few different ways to transfer, save, move, or change ownership of all your data. No matter which option(s) you choose, I strongly recommend taking some time to delete anything that you do not want to keep. It will make these processes much faster!
Taking Your Own Files With You
Option 1: Transfer Google Drive and Gmail to a different Google account This option allows you to move all of your Drive and Gmail content to a different Google account. This is a great option if you have access to another Google account - whether it is a personal one or a new school account. Here's the process: 1. Go to takeout.google.com/transfer 2. Enter the email address of the Google account that you want to transfer the data to 3. Verify the account by checking your email and clicking the "Get confirmation code" button:
4. Choose whether to transfer your entire Drive, your entire Gmail, or both - and then start the transfer:
Depending on the size of your Drive and number of emails, this process could take minutes, hours, days, or weeks to complete, but you do not need to keep anything open. You will receive an email when it is complete. Your new Drive will now have a folder that contains everything from your Londonderry Drive.
One thing to note with this process - your school Google account does not have a storage limit, but personal accounts do. If you want to transfer everything to a personal account, you may need to pay for increased storage in your personal account. This page will show you how much storage you are currently using and if you are logged into your personal account, you will see an option to purchase additional storage if necessary. Option 2: Download ALL Google related content to your computer This option is a good choice if you do not have another Google account to send your content or you just want to save everything to your own computer or external hard drive. The other benefit to this option is that you can download more than just Drive and Gmail files. Here's the process: 1. Go to takeout.google.com 2. Select which types of data you want to download...there are a lot of options!
3. The next step lets you choose the frequency, file type, and size of the download. Most likely, you will use the following settings, but you may opt to increase the file size if you know you have a lot of large files in your account:
4. Once you click "Create export", the process will begin. You do not need to stay logged in, as it may take days or weeks depending on the size of the files. You will receive an email when the export is complete. Follow that link to download your .zip file(s). These can then be stored on your computer, external hard drive, or flash drive until you are ready to import them into a new Google account.
Leaving Files For Others
Option 1: Move Files to a Shared Drive
If you are the owner of files that are shared with your department or a club/activity, the easiest thing to do is move those files into a Shared Drive. By doing this, the Shared Drive becomes the owner of the files rather than an individual. This means that the files will never be deleted when people leave the district. Please note that only teachers can create Shared Drives, but students can be added as members to contribute. If you need a better explanation of Shared Drives, check out one of my older posts! And one additional note - NEW this year, entire folders can be moved into Shared Drives!!
Option 2 - Transfer Ownership of Drive files If you don't want to use Shared Drives and instead just want to transfer just a few files to someone else in the district, you can do that by changing the ownership of the file. To do this, first share it with the new person as an editor. Then return to the share screen and change them from "Editor" to "Transfer ownership". Note that you can only transfer ownership to someone else in your school district's organization. Also note that this CANNOT be done with folders - only individual files.
To all staff and students who are moving on to new places - best of luck to all of you and I hope these overviews help make your transition a little easier! As always, please feel free to reach out if you need any assistance with this!
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