Guides / Fixes
How to Get Your Files Out Before You Lose a Work or School Account
You are leaving a job or finishing school, and the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account holding years of your own work is about to be shut off.
Why this happens
- These accounts belong to the organisation, not to you. Access typically ends on your last day, and the data is often deleted entirely within 30 to 90 days — sometimes immediately.
- Downloading is the obvious route and the worst one at scale. Google’s export produces enormous zip archives that frequently fail partway on large drives, and you need free disk space equal to everything you are moving, twice over once you re-upload.
- The window is smaller than it looks. Administrators often revoke third-party app access before deleting the account, so a transfer that would have worked last week may be refused today.
- Shared drives are a separate problem: files owned by the organisation may not be yours to take. What you can move is what you own or have been given access to.
What to do
- 1
Start now, not on your last day. A large migration can run for days, and it needs the account to stay authorised for the whole run.
- 2
Connect the work or school account as the source and a personal account as the destination.
- 3
Take your own work first — the folders you would actually miss — rather than starting with everything and running out of time.
- 4
Let it run. Transfers continue after you close the browser, and large runs are normal: a 510 GB, 222,844-file migration completed in full.
- 5
Check the report and spot-check the destination before you lose access, while re-running anything that failed is still possible.
If that is not it: This covers files you own or can read. It does not help with shared drives your organisation owns, and taking company material you have no right to is a different question with a different answer.
Common questions
How long do I have before a work Google account is deleted?
It varies by organisation. Access usually stops on your last day, and deletion commonly follows within 30 to 90 days — but an administrator can do both immediately, and many revoke third-party app access first. Treat your last day as the deadline for the transfer completing, not starting.
Can I transfer files after I have lost access to the account?
No. The transfer needs a valid authorised connection to the source for its whole duration. Once the account is disabled there is nothing to read, and nothing anyone can do about it afterwards.
What happens if my access is revoked mid-transfer?
The transfer stops and reports an authorisation failure, listing what had already arrived. Files copied before that point are intact at the destination — nothing is rolled back.
Do Google Docs stay editable after moving to another cloud?
They are exported to .docx, .xlsx and .pptx on the way out, so they open and edit normally in Word, Excel, LibreOffice or anything else. They stop being Google Docs, because Google Docs only exist inside Google.
Move your files instead
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