How to Save Files Owned By Former Employees or Students

A knowledge base article about How to Save Files Owned By Former Employees or Students provided by the UC Berkeley IT Service Hub - Knowledge Portal

Your Shared Files at Risk
Saving Content at Risk of Deletion
Recovering Lost or Deleted Files

Your Shared Files at Risk

Any content that is shared with you, whether shared at the file level or in a shared folder, is at risk of deletion when the owner leaves UC Berkeley. If you and/or your team will continue to need those files, you must take action to retain access before it is deleted.

A screenshot of a list of files, one of which shows a red box to the right of the file name. The red box says will be deleted.

Google Document titled "Critical Google Doc owned by an alumni who may not be renewing their account" marked "Alumni owned"

Saving Content at Risk of Deletion

1. Search For Files at Risk

View files shared with you marked "WILL BE DELETED" to see a list of content shared with you but owned by former faculty and staff.
View files shared with you marked "Alumni Owned" to see a list of content shared with you but owned by former students.
Watch Advanced Searching and Using Labels in Google Drive to lean more about using the Advanced Search feature to find all files at risk of deletion.

2. Review Content Make a Plan

Look through the files marked “WILL BE DELETED” and/or “Alumni Owned”, and evaluate whether or not they should be saved, and where they should reside moving forward. We suggest you do this with your team so that you agree on what can be ignored, what should be saved and where it should be saved. You should move your files in one of three ways:

My Drive (including shared folders) is only for content that no one else will need.
Shared Drive is for any content necessary to your team, unit, department or institution.
Alternative Options outside of Google are best for research data sets, backups, or archives. See Data Storage Allocation for Faculty for more information.

3. Move (or Copy) the content

My Drive (including shared folders)

Copy personally relevant content to your My Drive. This is only for content that no one else will need. All other files should be stored in a Shared Drive.

Shared Drive

Create a Shared Drive if you don't already have one. Follow the instructions in the article Create a Shared Drive and Manage Members.
Move single files or folders (only a couple at a time) from My Drive to a Shared Drive (you must be a Manager on the Shared Drive to do this). Learn more about Moving Content from My Drive to a Shared Drive.
- If you are not able to directly move files, you may need to instead make a copy first.
Increase your Shared Drive storage capacity if necessary, potentially at cost. Submit the Expanded Shared Drive Request Form.

Alternative Options

If you have research data sets, backups, or archives, it may be best to move it outside of Google Drive entirely. View Data Storage Allocation for Faculty for more information on getting access to other storage options.

Recovering Lost or Deleted Files

If you have already lost access to institutional content that you need, we can recover the content if it was deleted in the past 25 days. Please complete a Google Content Recovery Request to get started.