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Previously we had free accounts with Google for our Calendars, Contacts etc. We are now signed up as App Business and have new accounts. What is the easiest way to transfer:

  • Google Calendar
  • Google Contacts
  • Google Documents

information from the old account to the new account? I really don't want to have to recreate all my calendars or save all the Google docs locally and then upload them again to the new account.

Any pointers etc. greatly appreciated.

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3 Answers 3

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Google Calendar

  1. You cannot transfer primary calendars to another user, so open your events and copy them to a new (or existing) secondary calendar. This will preserve invited guests. If you don't have guests on your events, or it's just historical events you could simply Export and re-import all of your calendars via .ical (export won't save the "guest" statuses like transferring will).
  2. If it is a secondary calendar (or if you just moved your upcoming events there), invite your other account to share the calendar, then unsubscribe the original owner from the calendar.

Google Contacts

Contacts makes it very easy to export data. Visit the main contacts page directly, or within Gmail. At the right near the top are links called Import, Export, and Print. Click the Import link to initiate the import process.

Source - Google Data Liberation for Contacts

Google Documents

Update: Aug'13: It is now possible to transfer Ownership of a Document in Google Drive.

The only way is to either upload the files again to the Google Apps account or share the files with the Google Apps email address of yours. You cannot transfer the Ownership of the files yet (if you have upgraded Google Docs to Google Drive)- this feature will be coming shortly. If you are still using Google Docs, the owner can be changed to the Google Apps Account.

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  • I confirm you still can't transfer Google Drive docs to other domains (free to paid Apps). Here's the message if you attempt to change owners: "Sorry, cannot transfer ownership to [email protected]. Ownership can only be transferred to another user in the same domain as the current owner" Nov 5, 2012 at 22:58
  • Re: Google Documents, Downloading to a PC changes the format, which is not fun. Also, the web interface only allows one to "Move" or "Add" (as opposed to "Copy"). The only way to duplicate is one file at a time. "Add" is somewhat deceiving, in that it hard-links to the original file, without displacing the original hard-link. Nov 8, 2012 at 19:50
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Complementary answer for Google Documents

I had a lot of Google documents to migrate from a free account to a Google Apps academic account. The best way I found was using the Google Drive Desktop (PC or Mac) to make the copies. Here are the steps:

  • Google Drive Web:
    • In the free account, share the documents with the Google Apps academic user
    • In the academic user account, move the "Shared with me" files/collections into your main list (or use the Add to My Drive button). More info To make it easy, you can create a collection called "Files to migrate" and organize the things in there. This is so the shared stuff from the free account will show up on your PC/Mac.
  • Google Drive Desktop (Download info)
    • Set up Google Drive Desktop for the destination (e.g., Google Apps paid) account.
    • If all goes well, you should see the "Files to migrate" collection in the Google Drive folder on your PC (or Mac)
    • Using your Desktop interface, copy/paste the "Files to migrate" collection. The new files should belong now to your Google Apps academic account. This make take some time.

Credit goes to Bibiano Wenceslao, who wrote a blog post on this, although it was not specific to data migration.

Note: I didn't test it on a Mac - I used the Windows 7 PC version of Google Drive Desktop.

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with the help of free app-MultCloud, it's easy to do https://www.multcloud.com

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  • 1
    How will that help in this case? Just linking to an app isn't very helpful.
    – ale
    Apr 18, 2014 at 1:44
  • add more than one google drive accounts, then you can transfer data between them directly without downloading and uplaoding.
    – fifda
    Apr 18, 2014 at 6:36
  • but it converts all google doc files to Microsoft format which is unwanted :(
    – kubusz
    Aug 24, 2017 at 12:24

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