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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

I have a bunch of business documents owned by a Gmail account. I was concerned that one of these random lockouts could happen to me and basically shut down my business, so I set up a Google Workspace account.

...Only to find that you can't transfer ownership of a Google Doc from a Gmail account to a Workspace account because "security."

So at this point we have docs scattered across all kinds of Google accounts and domains which is the least secure thing I could imagine, great job Google.

100% in support of regulating the pants off of this company as well as evaluating alternatives to them.

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We're only talking a few docs by a single account... it is possible, semi-manually: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906... The Drive section of that.

But in essence: Share the files, make a copy once shared, delete the shared file and only the copy exists.

Better though: Don't use Google Drive for business critical docs if you're not a very high spend Google customer able to talk with an account manager. If you're a small/hobby user or individual, keep critical docs offline as well as online. Just consider it part of your business continuity plan.

Wifey's paying Google, yearly, for her SME's little GSuite / Google Workspace account. She's not paying a lot of money to Google (no adwords or anything: just the GSuite monthly payments for a few people). And yet when she calls, she gets support.

I'm not saying Google is great: what I'm saying is that once you pay even for the smallest business suite, you get to get actual people on the phone who are there to help you.

Don't ever move countries.

I set up a business account in one country and then moved to another country. Several years later I need to re-enter credit card info. It doesn't let me now because my billing address is now from a different country. Google's only solution? Create a new google account.

Apple is the same - in the UK for a few weeks and want to download, say, the free BBC app? Can't do that, because your credit card isn't a British one, so you could be trying to violate geofencing restrictions built into the App Store.

Oh, this is such a pain, I know this well. You can't even install some apps, because you are not in the correct "store", which is tied to your credit card billing address. So if you move to the US, you won't be able to use many local store apps. Totally ridiculous.

This is particularly annoying when the local app is necessary for public transport, Covid, concert tickets or similar.

I agree we need more regulation..

But are you sure about this problem? If you create Shared drives in a Google workspace, they take ownership of anything I move into it (after dismissing a warninge explaining what will happen), even if I take files in folders shared to me from someone else's gmail account

(The ownership model of drive was indeed terrible before they implemented the shared/team drives.)

Very interesting! Looks like we would need to upgrade our Workspace plan (and basically double our cost) to use this feature, which is not great, but it might be a solution.

It doesn't preserve everything like versioning, sharing info, etc, but if you're worried about losing access to these documents going to https://takeout.google.com every couple of months is certainly worth it.

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