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Google Workspace

Table of contents

  1. About Google Workspace
  2. Timeline and key dates
  3. What Google Workspace provides
  4. Choosing a new provider
  5. Migrating email to a new provider
  6. Migrating your Drive files to another Google Workspace
  7. Migrating and exporting your data with Google Takeout
    1. Creating an export
    2. Using the exported data
      1. Accessing or restoring email archives
      2. Accessing or restoring other files

About Google Workspace

We currently provide many Nightlines with Google Workspace accounts, which provide professional looking email addresses (like officer@your.nightline.ac.uk or your@nightline.ac.uk) alongside Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Some Nightlines may also have their Nightline Association provided Google Workspace account connected to a YouTube channel.

If you are using a Nightline Association provided Google Workspace account, you will need to migrate to another provider, or export any data you want to keep, by Friday 18th April 2025.

This page provides more information about what a migration entails, or how to export your data.

Timeline and key dates

Date What happens

No new accounts will be created.

All Google Workspace accounts belonging to Nightlines will be closed.

The closure of Google Workspace will also coincide with Nightlines no longer being able to use @your.nightline.ac.uk email addresses, as we will be discontinuing your.nightline.ac.uk domains. You can find out more about how we are decommissioning these domains on the domains and web hosting page.

We are hosting an NLA IT Q&A session focussing on migrating away from our Google Workspace accounts on Monday 17th March at 6pm. The joining details for this are on Slack for Nightlines and the Portal dashboard.

What Google Workspace provides

Included in our current Google Workspace provision is:

  • Gmail (with a custom professional-looking email address).
  • Google Meet (video-conferencing with up to 150 participants).
  • Google Drive (with file storage up to 100TB, and Shared Drives).
  • Google Chat.
  • Google Calendar.
  • Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
  • Google Forms.
  • Google Sites (websites at sites.google.com/nightline.ac.uk/<site>).
  • YouTube channel accounts.

Your Nightline may be using some or all of these services. You may also have some other services (provided by Google or external providers) connected to your Google Workspace accounts.

Choosing a new provider

We are strongly recommending that Nightlines migrate to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 accounts provided by their parent bodies (such as a Students’ Union or university). This ensures the service you migrate to is compliant with their data protection policies and agreements, and removes the responsibility for service compliance away from your Nightline and its volunteers.

If you are migrating to a stakeholder-provided service, some of these migration steps will need to be undertaken by your stakeholder. We suggest pointing them to this guidance, and discussing the steps of migration with them.

Migrating email to a new provider

If you are migrating your existing accounts to another Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 instance wholly owned by your Nightline, we may be able to perform the email migration on your behalf using automated tools.

Unfortunately we can’t do this for other providers because it requires providing the destination workspace temporary administrative privileges that we must retain control over. We therefore suggest following the steps to export email using Google Takeout for all other migrations.

Migrating your Drive files to another Google Workspace

If you are migrating Google Drive files between your current Nightline Association provided Google Workspace account to another Google Workspace account, you should be able to migrate files using Shared Drives.

  1. Using your new Google Workspace account, visit Google Drive.
  2. Under ‘Shared Drives’, create a new Shared Drive, and invite the account you are migrating from.
  3. Using your old (Nightline Association provided) Google Workspace account, transfer all of the files from your ‘My Drive’ to the new Shared Drive.
  4. Using your new Google Workspace account, transfer the files from the new Shared Drive into the new account’s ‘My Drive’.

Migrating and exporting your data with Google Takeout

The primary tool for migrating your data away from the Nightline Association’s Google Workspace instance is to use Google Takeout. Each user can individually use Google Takeout to export their data, which includes emails (from Gmail), files (from a user’s Google Drive), calendar events and other data from various Google services.

Creating an export

You should start this process a few days before you intend to download the data, as after you follow these steps it may take time before the export is ready for you to download.

Whilst you can export all of your data in one go, a useful trick can be to follow the process below multiple times - once for each service you want to export data from - as this can be quicker and will leave you with more sensibly organised files to download.

  1. Sign in to your Google Workspace account.
  2. Go to the Google Takeout page. The boxes pre-ticked have data associated with your account stored. We suggest unselecting the services you don’t have any meaningful data stored with to reduce the size of the data you download.
  3. When you’ve selected the data you want to export, click Next step. This should move you to a section titled ‘Choose file type, frequency and destination’.
  4. Set the export destination. We recommend choosing Send download link via email, as this doesn’t use up any storage quota.
  5. Under ‘Frequency’, make sure Export once is selected.
  6. Under ‘File type & size’ you have two options. If you’ve never seen a .tgz file before, we suggest choosing .zip (.tgz files are more heavily compressed, but not as commonly used).
  7. Under ‘File size’, we recommend selecting 10 GB or smaller.
  8. Finally, click Create export.

Later (potentially a few minutes up to several days) you will receive an email from noreply@google.com with instructions and a link to download the prepared file(s).

Depending on how much data you have stored in your drive, these downloads could be quite big, so you may want to consider using a high-speed and non-data-capped connection when you download them (such as a connection provided by your university). Make sure to check you have enough free storage on the device you’re downloading the files to.

Google Takeout only exports Google Drive files you have created in your My Drive. If a file is in a Shared Drive or owned by another user (and shared with you), it will not be included in your export. You might want to move Shared Drive files to your My Drive if you want to export them.

Make sure you compare your Google Takeout data with the original data in your account. If any data is missing, you can either re-run the export using the steps above or by simply downloading individual files from your Google Drive.

Using the exported data

When you export data through Google Takeout, you will have to extract the provided .zip or archive files to be able to find your original data. For every file, you will find a .json file containing all the metadata (such as creation date, and who the file was shared with).

Accessing or restoring email archives

You can access exported email archives (which are .mbox files) using a variety of different software options. Any text editor or word processor should be able to open these files, but to upload them to another account, we recommend using:

  • Got Your Back (GYB) for more technical users. This is a command-line based tool that supports both backup (if you have not used Google Takeout) and the restoration of backups and .mbox files to another Google account.
  • Mozilla Thunderbird for everyone else, including Nightlines moving to email accounts outside of Google Workspace.

For those using Mozilla Thunderbird to restore exported mail archives:

  1. Download and set up Mozilla Thunderbird on your laptop/desktop using your new account.
  2. Go to Settings -> Add-Ons and Themes and type ImportExportTools into the “Find more add-ons” box in the top-right.
  3. Find and select the ImportExportTools NG add-on by Christopher Leidigh, and click Add to Thunderbird to install it.
  4. Go back to the main email tab and right-click Local Folders and create a new folder (you could call this “Migration”).
  5. Right-click on the “Migration” folder you created, select ImportExportTools NG -> Import mbox file.
  6. Click on Import directly one or more mbox files.
  7. Find your exported Google Takeout .mbox file(s) (to choose multiple files, hold down Ctrl or Command when selecting). When you’ve selected all the files you want to restore, click Open. This may take several minutes.
  8. Once your file(s) have been imported, you can use this local folder to view all of your emails. You can then move them to the email account you have set up in Thunderbird by dragging and dropping either the folder or the emails within it to the folders of the main email account.

ImportExportTools NG is a third-party import add-on for Thunderbird. Whilst it does restore all of the exported emails, the folders/labels from your original account are not retained, so all sent and received emails will end up in the same folder when you restore them. We would recommend keeping this folder separate from the emails in your new account to reduce any confusion.

Accessing or restoring other files

Google Drive files are usually converted into their Microsoft Office equivalents when you export them, although you can choose to download all files as .pdf (not recommended).

These Microsoft Office file formats allow you to open them using a variety of software suites alongside Microsoft Office or Google Drive, including free tools like:

If you are migrating to a Microsoft account, you can simply upload the extracted files to Microsoft OneDrive. This will keep them in Microsoft Office file formats.

If you are uploading the files to Google Drive, you can convert the files back to Google Drive formats:

  1. Using the account you are moving the files to, go to Google Drive settings.
  2. Tick the box next to Convert uploads to Google Docs editor format. This will convert the uploaded files back to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.

You can then follow Step 1 again to disable this conversion feature if you want to keep some files in Microsoft Office format.

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