Compare: Takeout vs. Transfer vs. VaultMe

Audience

• All individuals moving, exporting or transferring files to personal accounts and external hard drives.  

Preventing Data Loss

⚠️Before you leave UC Berkeley, it is your responsibility to prevent the loss of important institutional data. It is a best practice to put collaborative files in a Shared Drive to transfer ownership to the Shared Drive/UC Berkeley. Read Move Files to a Shared Drive for detailed instructions. 

Comparing Account Transfer Options

Troubleshooting Issues with Google Takeout/Transfer

If you get a message blocking you from Google Takeout or Transfer, similar to: Transfer Your Content is only available to authorized Google Workspace for Education Accounts. Please contact your administrator, or sign in with another Google Account

• You may be logged into multiple accounts.
  • Open an incognito or private browsing window, then log in to only your @berkeley.edu account before initiating your transfer. 

If your transfer or export is taking too long, or you don't know what its progress is:

• There is no way to monitor the progress of your transfer.
  • Wait at least a week for your transfer or export to finish. Note: You may see copied files or email appear in batches on your Google account during the copy process.

If you want to stop your transfer midway through:

• You cannot halt a transfer once it starts and you have no way to monitor its progress.
  • Wait until the transfer is finished. 

If some of your files didn’t transfer:

• You may have files that are shared with you but you do not own (even if they reside in a folder you own). Only files owned by you will transfer. For more information, review the article Compare: My Drive vs. Shared Drives vs. Shared With Me.
  • Make a copy of files you want to save before initiating your transfer/export. 

If your transfer failed:

• You might not have enough storage.
  • Check to see if the account you are transferring to has adequate storage available. You can purchase a Google One storage plan large enough to support your data transfer to ensure success.
• The export might be too large.
  • Export data for each Google service (Gmail, Drive, etc) separately and try again. 

If you received multiple different archives:

• Your total transfer is over 50 GB, and you will receive multiple archives of 50 GB or less.

If you receive an .MBOX file:

• Google Takeout provides email in the .MBOX format.
  • You can keep your email in this format for archival purposes. You can also import the .MBOX files into any third-party mail client that supports the format or special purpose programs for transferring email between accounts.

To get answers to more issues, view Google’s common questions for downloading data.