How to move a folder to a Shared Drive

In this post, we’re going to look at moving folders from My Drive to a Shared Drive both for a Google Workspace account and a personal Gmail account

How to move a folder to a Shared Drive with a Workspace account

Here, I have a folder on My Drive in my Workspace account.

I want to move it to this Shared Drive.

Simple – Just drag and drop the folder from your My Drive to the Shared Drive.

It will confirm what you are moving, in this case a folder with 3 documents inside. Just click “Move”.

As we can see, the folder is now in the Shared Drive with all the files moved in one go.

How to move a folder to a Shared Drive with a personal Gmail account

This time I have this folder on My Drive in my personal Gmail.

I drag it over to the Shared Drive we saw above but when I try to drop it in, it tells me I don’t have permission to do it. Why is that?

By default, when you add someone to a Shared Drive they are given “Content Manager” access but this access doesn’t include moving folders to a Shared Drive. But we can remedy that!

Right-click on the Shared Drive and open “Manage members”.

As you can see my Gmail account has Content manager access.

Click on that and change it to “Manager” and save the changes.

Now when I try to move the folder to the Shared Drive it works.

As you can see the folder is now in the Shared Drive!

This is a great, quick way to move files and folders to a Workspace Shared Drive.

It’s particularly useful when migrating from a personal account to a Workspace account, where you can move your files and folders to a Shared Drive and then to My Drive of the new account.

Check out my Workspace tips on YouTube Shorts.

Find out more on how to use Shared Drives here.