How To: Migrate Google Apps for Education Account to Personal Google Account

Last Updated: May 6th, 2015

This time of year many schools are saying goodbye to students for the last time, and a good number of those students want to take their Google Apps for Education account documents and data with them. Last year I created a handy guide for how to do that based on the following thought process.

Problem

• Your school district has students leaving and not coming back next year (graduating seniors, students moving out of district, or going on to other schools) and they have a ton of stuff in their Google Accounts that they’d like to take with them.

Compounded Problem

• Google has decided that it’s either not technically or systemically feasible to allow Google Apps for Education Accounts to transition/be directly transferred to personal Google Accounts.

Potential Solution

• Google has created Takeout, an increasingly useful utility that allows Google Account users to pack up and take almost all of their Google account with them to be uploaded to a new Google Account. This works whether you’re moving from a Google Apps for Education Account, or a regular Google Account. The video I created to walk you through the extremely simple process is below, but be warned; users with large amounts of Google Documents and data may take hours (or days) before the archive is prepared and links to download are emailed to them.

Problems with Potential Solution

• For reasons as of yet unknown to me, Google Sites isn’t included in the Takeout archive. Most likely the complex nature of the websites being built within Sites would be too cumbersome to create an easily transferable folder of HTML documents and supporting files. Never fear, there’s a way to transfer ownership of those sites, and then make a copy of them with your new Google account. The video below details how to do this.

This is great Ben, is there a page where you describe all of these steps for your students?

You can click RIGHT HERE to access the directions for migrating all of your Google Apps for Education account that I modified and assembled directly from various Google Help sites. I also have a couple of video tutorials for how to do this, which you’ve seen embedded earlier in this post. I hope this information helps, and if you identify any flaws, let me know, so I can improve the documentation for my students, and other educators that end up using the resource.