I am helping a charity shutdown one of their Google Workspaces. The charity currently has two domains, each with its own Google Workspace account. I have admin access to owner@legacy.com and owner@active.com which are the highest admin privileges in both Workspaces. They are structured as follows:

• active.com - This google workspace is actively being used. It has 15 users and 700GB worth of data across google drive and gmail.
• legacy.com - This google workspace needs to be deprecated. It owns about 100MB worth of files. It also owns several hundred folders that contains files owned by @active.com users (ie. 700GB worth of data from @active.com is stored in folders created by owner@legacy.com). Only 3 users remain with @legacy.com.

BACKGROUND

A person named owner@legacy.com made and OWNS several hundred folders in their google drive and its structured something like this:

- Charity Folder    |- Finance      |- Invoices 1998         |- Q1         |- Q2         |- notes         |- important         ...etc...      |- Invoices 1999         |- Q1         |- Q2         |- notes         |- important         ...etc...    |- Branding      |- Logos         |- summercampaigns         |- christmasevents         ...etc...      |- Media partners         |- telecom         |- radio         ...etc...    |- Presentations         ...etc... 

The owner@legacy.com does NOT have any files in these folders. He merely made up the whole directory tree of folders and is the highest most privileged owner of these folders. Additonally, owner@legacy.com has shared all these folders with the 15 users of @active.com as the editor role.

For the past 2 decades, everyone at @active.com has been populating all the sub folders of Charity Folder.

OBJECTIVE

I need to shutdown owner@legacy.com WITHOUT deleting any of the folders in the Charity Folder. Also, a person named employee1@active.com made a new Shared Drive called Charity Drive. employee1@active.com wants Charity Folder to be placed into Charity Drive so that everyone at @active.com can collectively own everything and not be held hostage to access privileges of owner@legacy.com. The folder structure/tree must be preserved along with all its contents.

I do not know how to acheive this objective. Here are things I tried:

FAILURE 1 - Transfer ownership

I logged into drive.google.com as owner@legacy.com. Then I did the following:

• right click on Charity Folder
• select Share
• typed employee1@active.com into the field Share Folder with [add people]
• clicked on employee1@active.com and made him the editor
• right click employee1@active.com and selected Transfer ownership

This resulted in the following permission error:

Sorry, cannot transfer ownership to employee1@active.com. Ownership can only be transferred to another user in the same organization as the current owner.

FAILURE 2 - Moving to Charity Drive

I logged into drive.google.com as owner@legacy.com. I confirmed that I have full access privileges to the Charity Drive shared folder. I right click Charity Folder, click Move, select All Locations, click Shared Drives, click Charity Drive, click Move.

Then I get the error

Can't move to "Charity Drive"549,394 items can't be moved. If this is a folder, it may include additional unmoveable items.

The move was cancelled because the percentage of items that couldn't be moved is over the limit.

Download item list (CSV)

When I click Download item list (CSV), I am given a csv file with over 500k files that couldn't be moved because the files are not owned by owner@legacy.com.

FAILURE 3 - Zip Extractor

I logged into drive.google.com as owner@legacy.com, then I checkmarked Charity Folder and pressed download. After several hours, I got about 20 zip files, each the size of about 2GB. I then uploaded each zip file to Charity Drive. I then right clicked each zip file in Charity Drive, and I chose Zip Extractor (installed from https://zipextractor.app), which took me to the Zip Extractor website, then I clicked Extract to Drive.

The problem with this approach is that if both folder1.zip and folder2.zip have the same folder (but different file contents), then those folders are duplicated on google drive. For example, we will see something like this:

- Charity Drive    |- Finance      |- Invoices 1998         ...etc...      |- Invoices 1998         ...etc...      |- Invoices 1998         ...etc...      |- Invoices 1999         ...etc...      |- Invoices 1999         ...etc...    |- Finance      |- Invoices 1999         ...etc...      |- Invoices 1999         ...etc...      |- Invoices 2000         ...etc...      |- Invoices 2000         ...etc...      |- Invoices 2000         ...etc...

I could not find a setting that "merges folders" so that folder names are not repeated.

FAILURE 4 - Unzip locally and upload

I logged into drive.google.com as owner@legacy.com, then I checkmarked Charity Folder and pressed download. After several hours, I got about 20 zip files, each the size of about 2GB. I tried to unzip each zip file locally on my Windows 11 computer. But I get a lot of errors about file names being too long for the windows file system.

FAILURE 5 - Unzip a massive zip files

I logged into drive.google.com as owner@legacy.com, then I checkmarked Charity Folder and pressed download. I forget which option I did, but I was able to download a few massive zip files. For example, one zip file for the folder Charity Folder>Website Assets which as about 80GB, one zip file for Charity Folder>Branding Material which was 90GB, etc... I uploaded to Charity Drive. Then I tried to use Zip Extractor similar to Failure 3. But Zip Extractor gave me Unknown Error when I tried to Extract to Drive.

FAILURE 6 - Google Takeout

I logged into takeout.google.com as owner@legacy.com. I went to Create A New Export, I only selected Drive . For the Drive settings, I did this:

• I checkmarked All Drive data included>Drive Content Options>Include all files and folders in Drive
• Under Advanced settings>Additonal Files and check marked Include named, published, and uploaded versions Include additional info for files and folders`.

I clicked Next and Create Export.

After a few minutes, I get a zip file of only a few megabytes, and it has only the folders created by owner@legacy.com without any contents in them.

Can someone tell me how to achieve my objective?