If you haven’t yet, review the Google Workspace Migrate best practices first.
Before you begin a Google Workspace to Google Workspace migration, review the following points for email, Google Calendar, Google Drive items, shared drives, and other types of data.
Email & email addresses | Calendar data | Drive | Shared drives | Other types of data
Email & email addresses
| Email forwarding |
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| To avoid duplicates and errors, email messages are checked to make sure they don’t already exist in the target mailbox.
If you use email forwarding and enable the Accelerate old messages setting, set the Insert Before Date field to the day before forwarding was turned on to reduce the risk of data duplication. For details, go to Understand scan reports. |
| Links in email messages |
| Gmail scans migrated email messages for security and threat issues and occasionally crawls links in the body of email messages.
To avoid this issue and modestly increase migration performance, you can use the Accelerate old messages option in your settings template. Before you do, review how it works. For details, go to Migrate Mail content. |
| Changing a user’s email address |
| Once you start migrating a user's content, we recommend that you don’t change their email address.
If you change an address during or after a migration and then run a delta migration, Google Workspace Migrate remigrates all of the user's content, making the delta process significantly slower than usual. |
| Label colors |
| Only standard label colors are supported. Labels with custom colors don't migrate.
If you get an error, remove the custom colors from labels in the source account and try again. For details about standard label colors, go to Gmail API: Color. |
Calendar data
| API limits |
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If you’re running a large migration (1,000+ calendars), you might reach the Google Calendar API daily limit and see 403 errors. You can request an increase to the query-per-minute limit for the Calendar API:
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| Use an identity mapping |
Use an identity mapping to:
For details, go to Create & manage an identity mapping. |
| Auto-accepted meetings |
| If the calendar resource is set to Auto-accept meetings that don't conflict (the default) and conflicting bookings are migrated, the meeting organizer gets an email for each declined invitation. The super administrator account used to migrate the resource also receives an email.
To use content compliance rules to deliver these messages to email quarantines, go to Set up rules for advanced email content filtering. |
| Migrate using super administrator accounts |
| By default, Google Workspace Migrate uses all super administrator accounts to write calendar resource events to the target domain. Using super admin accounts increases migration speed and reduces the risk of quota issues.
Note the following points:
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Drive
| Large single-user migrations |
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| A migration of 400,000 files or more to one user's Google Drive account requires extra planning. Use a sharding users list to spread the migration load among many user accounts.
To determine the number of user accounts to add to the list, use the larger value of:
We recommend you set up temporary Google Workspace users for your sharding users list. Then, delete the users after you complete the migration. For details, go to Create a sharding users list. |
| Comments in Google Docs |
Comments get copied along with the files. Following a migration, a note is added that the comments were copied.
To associate copied comments to a new account, manually update comments with the new email address. |
| Content shared with users outside of your organization |
| If users or groups outside of your organization have a Google Account, you can add them to Drive files and folders and migrate sharing permissions. External users or groups without a Google Account can receive an email with a custom access link at migration time.
To reduce the amount of time that users without a Google Account have access to shared files and folders:
Tip: Use the Permissions by Object report to identify externally shared objects before a migration. For details, go to Understand scan reports. |
| Links in migrated Drive files |
| Links in Google and non-Google files must be corrected manually after a migration. |
| Running test migrations to Drive |
| If you delete items in the target Drive account following a test migration, make sure to empty the trash before rerunning the migration. Google Workspace Migrate tracks items by ID and restores items from the target account's trash if you run the migration again.
Emptying the trash avoids this issue and allows you to run a fresh migration. |
| General access options & target audiences |
Google Workspace Migrate migrates the sharing permissions of items that are saved to Drive using the:
To migrate permissions for the default target audience, include the source and target domains in the identity mapping, for example, example.com,solarmora.com. For more information, go to: |
| Migrating files & folders to multiple locations in Drive |
Google Workspace Migrate attempts to remigrate a file or folder to a new location in Drive if:
The outcome of the remigration depends on the item's existing and new locations. If both locations are in My Drive or in the same shared drive, the item is moved to the new location. Otherwise, the item is not moved and the transaction fails with error code 1081344. |
| Orphaned content |
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Google Workspace Migrate no longer creates orphaned Google Drive items on the target account during a Google Workspace to Google Workspace migration. Google Workspace Migrate doesn't create orphaned Google Drive items on the target account if you:
When orphaned content isn't created on the target account, Google Workspace Migrate migrates orphaned items to the target owner's My Drive root. To avoid this scenario, you can:
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| Externally owned files in a user's My Drive |
| Files that both reside in a user's My Drive and are owned by a user outside of your organization aren't migrated. The Shared content by user report does not show these files. |
| API limits |
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If you're running a large migration, you might reach the Google Drive API daily limit and get 403 errors. For details about API limitations, go to Usage limits. You can request an increase to the query-per-minute limit for the Drive API. For more information, go to Requesting a higher quota limit. Depending on your Google Workspace edition, you might have additional Drive storage limits. For details, visit Storage and upload limits for Google Workspace. |
Shared drives
| Migrating to shared drives |
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| Mapping shared drives |
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For detailed information about Google Workspace mappings, go to Create & manage a mapping. When mapping a shared drive:
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| Restricted permissions |
| Restricted permissions (where a child file or folder has fewer permissions than its parent) are not supported by shared drives. If the file or folder has restricted permissions on the source account, the restricted permissions are not migrated. |
| Access to shared drives on target account |
If the original content authors don’t have access to the shared drives on the target account, files are transferred using the target GUser account specified in the mapping. This type of transfer can create bottlenecks and slow a migration.
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Other types of data
| Groups |
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For Google Groups, you must create groups in the target account first. Groups aren't automatically created by the migration process. When migrating groups:
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| Forms |
When migrating forms:
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Next step
Now it's time to set up a Google Workspace connection. To get started, see Add a source connection.
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