The obvious way to move off Google Drive is to download everything and upload it somewhere else. It works, slowly, and it has two problems that are worth avoiding rather than discovering.
Why the obvious way is painful
Your connection becomes the bottleneck twice. Every byte travels down to your machine and back up again. On a typical home connection with 20 Mbit upstream, 300 GB is roughly 33 hours of uploading alone - and your laptop has to stay awake and connected for all of it. Any interruption in a naive transfer starts the affected file again, for reasons worth understanding.
Google’s own formats are not files. Docs, Sheets and Slides do not exist as documents on disk. Exporting converts them to .docx, .xlsx or .pdf, and conversion is lossy. Comments, suggestions, revision history and some formatting do not survive. Complex spreadsheets are the worst affected - formulas referencing other sheets, conditional formatting and scripts frequently do not come through intact.
That second point catches people weeks later, when a spreadsheet turns out to have converted imperfectly and the original has been deleted.
Move it server to server
The better approach is to let the destination pull directly from Google, so neither leg touches your machine. The transfer runs at datacentre speed and continues whether your laptop is open or not.
We support this: connect your Google account, choose what to bring across, and the import runs server-side. Large libraries still take a while, but they take it without you sitting there.
Decide about Google-native files first
Before starting anything, look at how much of your Drive is Docs, Sheets and Slides rather than uploaded files. In Drive, filtering by type gives you the answer in a minute.
If it is a small proportion, export those to standard formats and accept the conversion. Spot-check the complex ones.
If your work genuinely lives in Google Docs, be honest that migrating the files does not migrate the documents. Collaborative editing history is not something you can export. In that case a partial migration is the correct outcome: move the archives and finished work, keep live collaborative documents where they are until you have decided how to replace the collaboration itself. Pretending otherwise produces a migration that appears complete and quietly is not.
Clean up before you move
Migration is the one moment when everyone is willing to delete things. Use it.
Empty the trash first, or you will pay to store it. Look for duplicates that
accumulate as file (1).pdf and Copy of Copy of budget. Check for old exports,
video files nobody has opened in three years, and the shared folders from projects
that ended in 2023.
It is far easier to remove this now than after it has been carefully copied somewhere new and re-integrated into your folder structure.
Then size the destination against what remains, not against what you started with. Our sizing guide has the per-file-type arithmetic. A Drive containing a photo library will need a paid plan rather than the 5 GB free tier - that is worth establishing before the transfer, not during it.
Verify before you delete anything
The step everyone skips, and the only one that makes the migration safe.
Compare counts and total size at both ends. They will not match exactly - converted files differ in size - but the shape should be right, and a large shortfall means something failed silently.
Spot-check the things you would most hate to lose. Open them; do not just confirm they exist. Pay particular attention to anything converted from a Google format, and to files with unusual characters in their names, which is where path handling bugs surface.
Check nested folders, especially deep ones. Flattening is a classic migration failure and it is invisible from a file count alone.
Keep the Drive contents for a few weeks while you work from the new location. Gaps surface when you go looking for something specific, not during the migration itself. Cancel the old subscription after that, not before.
Rebuild sharing deliberately
Share links do not migrate, and that is an opportunity rather than a loss.
Every external share in an old Drive is one somebody set up and nobody revisited. Rather than recreating them all, recreate only the ones still in use - with expiry dates this time - and let the rest lapse quietly.
The same applies to folder permissions. Rather than replicating whatever accreted over five years, use the move to establish a structure where the right access is the default; our guide to team folders and permissions covers what that looks like.
A realistic sequence
Audit what you have and what proportion is Google-native. Clean up aggressively. Size the destination. Run the server-side import. Verify by opening things, not by counting them. Rebuild the shares you still need. Work from the new location for a few weeks. Then, and only then, remove the old copy.
