In this tutorial, Shaun Whynacht addresses a common issue for businesses that rely on Google Workspace: retrieving ownership of files stored in a former employee’s Google Drive without downloading them. He demonstrates a practical, step‑by‑step method: (1) log into the ex‑employee’s account, (2) create a new folder (e.g., “miscellaneous files – [first name]”), (3) move all stray files into that folder, (4) share the folder with yourself as an editor, (5) change your role from editor to owner via the Share dialog, and (6) confirm ownership transfer. Once ownership is transferred, the former account can be safely deleted without losing any client‑related documents. Shaun concludes by encouraging viewers to ask questions in the comments and to subscribe for more business‑tech tips.
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So you're running your business on Google and you use Google Drive a lot. You've got an employee who leaves your organization. Now they have a lot of files within their own My Drive on the Google account. How do you get access to that back to you without actually downloading those files? That's a great question. That's one that I had to figure out myself because we went through that here at Blue Cow Marketing. I'm going to show you right now how easy it actually is to get ownership of those files back. So Here I am logged into the former employee's account, and in here are a bunch of files that they had created. Okay, so what I'm going to do, any folder that's in there— now I've already shared the ownership back to me on most of these, but I'm going to show you in this process all the files that are on the outlying part of it. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to make a new folder, and I'm just going to call this miscellaneous files, and I'll put the employee's first name in there. We'll create that so it's a folder, and then we're going to go ahead and we're going to highlight all the subfiles that are there, and we're going to move them into that miscellaneous folder right there, and we're going to click move. Okay, now that that's there, it's still owned by this employee's account, but we're going to right-click and we're going to share. Now I'm going to share it to myself. Editor. That's the first step, has to be shared with me initially. Now there's one more step you need to take. You need to go back into that folder, click Share again, find yourself, go to the Editor part, drop it down, and go Transfer Ownership. Click Yes. Once that's done, you will get a notification. As we pop over here, see, so it says I'm now the owner of that folder and it's in My Drive. So once you've got all those files switched over as you as the owner, you can go ahead and delete their Google account and you're not going to lose any of those important files, especially if they're working on client projects. You don't want to have that happen. So it was a great little time saver and, uh, you know, allows me not to keep all these, these accounts open because of those files that are there. So hopefully that is something that you will be able to utilize in your business and your organization. And if not, if you've got any other questions, please in the comments below, leave them in there, I'll reply to you. And if you like this content, show us some love, hit the subscribe button, hit the bell, get some notifications of upcoming videos. I appreciate your time watching this, and thanks, and have a good time growing your business. Good luck.
