I am currently “stranded” in a Google Legacy free workspace account and am looking to migrate to a standard gmail account. The challenge is migrating all the data.
Based on my understanding of the new Google Backup / Restore features, it looks like I can backup my gmail, calendar, contacts and drive data from my workspace account and then restore it to gmail. If my understanding is correct, this is incredibly helpful.
The remaining challenge is migrating all the photos, while preserving all of the metadata and album structures. Is this supported?
Not sure how the free workspace account works, but to make a backup you need to have tenant access. I would guess that would be possible, but the “legacy” part may mean that it is not.
Restoring can be done to another tenant, but since your destination is Gmail, you do not get tenant access (assuming this is not a new paid workspace). The APIs probably work, but I don’t know how to get a service account that can access a Gmail account.
You can restore to local disk where you get some native formats of everything, and in principle you should be able to import that back into the new account using the regular UI (drive, gmail, calendar, etc)
Also, Duplicati is doing backups and not striving to be a perfect sync tool, which means that it will do a best-effort recreating data. If the goal is a synchronization, I would look for other tools.
In theory that should allow you to download everything from a google account to your computer and then importing it to your new account, preserving folder structures and other personalised items.
For Google Photos, there’s a trick involving sharing your entire Google Photos storage with the new account through Partner Sharing and then have the new account save everything. When that is done, you can safely delete your photos from the old account.
See this thread on how to do it (the post marked as “Recommended Answer”) :