1. Agree the shared drive's purpose, owner team and membership. Use separate drives when access requirements differ significantly.
2. Open Drive and select Shared drives. Create a new drive if your account is permitted to do so.
3. Add members with roles appropriate to their work. Keep management permission limited to people responsible for structure and access.
4. Review external sharing and non-member access restrictions available to the drive.
5. Create a clear folder structure and move a small representative set of files first.
6. Test access, editing and ownership behaviour with ordinary team members before a large migration.

Existing links, ownership and permissions can be affected by a move. Check whether the source files are eligible and whether external collaborators still need access. A large drag-and-drop operation without an inventory can leave a team unsure where important records went.

Remove the person's membership and review any other direct or group-based access. The shared drive helps keep team files available, but it does not automatically transfer unrelated My Drive files, email or external application ownership.

Check the subscription edition, administrator policy, assigned role and source ownership. Ask for a targeted review rather than moving business files into a personal account to bypass the restriction.

Record the drive's purpose and access owner, and review membership periodically. Too many broadly accessible drives can be as difficult to govern as one large folder containing every department's confidential material.

• Sharing Google Drive files with customers securely
• Finding and reducing Google Workspace storage use
• Transferring a departing employee's Google Workspace data
• Keeping business services under the right account ownership

• Google shared-drive collaboration
• Google Workspace Drive ownership transfer