Removing someone but keep their folders/files?

#1

Hey there!

I manage the GDrive within our cohousing community but one of our more active digital collaborators has moved house. This person is the owner of quite a few folders/files on a drive shared by 40 people. To my understanding, removing them from the main folder will likely also remove their stuff, which can be things a lot of people are relying on – like our drinking tab, very important!
Should I now make manual copies of the files they own (and thus peruse through hundreds of folders) or is there a better way? Should I give former inhabitants the assignment of transferring their ownership to me? Which is likely not an easy task if the shared folder has a very complex structure… What tricks does InSync have up their sleeve to attack this problem?

#2

I just discovered that it’s possible to search for “owner:email@address.com” within Google Drive and I just did that for this person, which came up with 223 results… Any kind of automation would be very nice! :grimacing:

#3

Hi @Timmy! User permissions fall outside the scope of Insync’s features, since those are settings that Google Drive handles.

Transferring ownership must be done through these steps: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2494892?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop.

You could probably check for file structure to make sure most, if not all, are within parent folders. And then maybe put all those folders within a master folder? So that you only need to ask the owner/s to only transfer one big folder to you. You can re-arrange the structure at a later time if need be.

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#4

Hi Mia, thank you for your reply. I hoped there would be some sneaky InSync feature that finds folders/files by person X and sneakily copies them, then removes the old one, so I’d then be the owner of said files. Ah well, worth a shot. Looks like I’ll be doing some digging! :grimacing:

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