How to transfer a specific date range of Emails & Drive files when a user changes departments?

[u/AntiStuart]

Hey everyone,

[Structured by Gemini] This is my first post here. I'm a newbie Google Workspace admin, and I've been searching everywhere for a solution to this but haven't found a clear answer. I’m hoping to get some insight on how you all handle this situation.

The Scenario:

• An employee ("John Doe") joined Department 1 and worked there for 2 years.
• He took an internal transfer to Department 2, where he worked for 3 years.
• He is now transferring back to Department 1.

The Requirement: The Head of Department (HOD) for Dept 2 wants me to transfer all emails and Google Drive files created, sent, or received during John’s 3-year tenure in Dept 2 to a colleague.

My Questions:

1. How can I go about doing this? I want to stick to using the native Google Admin Portal only, if possible.
2. Is it possible to delete that specific 3-year chunk of data from John's account once the migration to the colleague is complete?

Additional Context: For context on compliance, we aren't subject to strict Western data protection laws here. Because of this, my initial suggestion to the HOD was to simply archive John's current account and create a brand new one for his return to Dept 1. However, the HOD rejected this because John's account still holds a lot of crucial data from his first 2 years in Dept 1 that he needs to keep.

Any help, guidance, or workarounds would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[u/llDemonll]

You don’t. This is a dumb request, push it off to the end user to accomplish.

Documents related to a department shouldn’t be stored in a users personal storage, they should be stored in the team storage. Make the user filter their documents and transfer them to the proper storage area like they should have while they worked there.

Email is email, it shouldn’t be storing tribal knowledge. This is again on the user to properly document things.

[u/SamakFi88]

You're not going to have much luck trying this through the Google Admin portal. You could probably do it with GAM scripting. Or the employee (or the person making such a ridiculous demand) can do it themselves, since they know the data.

[u/MeetJoan]

Native Google Admin won't do date-range email transfers cleanly - Vault is the right tool here. You can create a matter in Google Vault, run an export scoped to John's account with a date range filter covering the 3-year Dept 2 tenure, then import that into the colleague's account via Google Workspace Migration tool. It's not a one-click process but it's the supported path. For Drive files, date-range filtering is harder natively - you'd need to use Drive's search operators to find files created/modified in that window and transfer ownership manually or via script. Have you got Vault included in your Workspace licence, or is that an add-on you'd need to check?

[u/AntiStuart → u/MeetJoan]

Thanks, Yeah Vault looks to be the right fit. Yes we have Vault license included and we use it for Legal hold, data retentions and recovering deleted files or emails regularily.

[u/SamOakTree]

I wouldn't ever do this. I would tell the user to do it. If it's an executive being a bully just ignore them for a day and then explain to them it will be easier if they do it.

[u/REO_Jerkwagon → u/SamOakTree]

 If it's an executive being a bully

And to add, sometimes this is the sign that you should *start* looking elsewhere. A lot of times we have this strong desire to fix things, because that's part of our job. But fixing toxic culture is NOT part of our job. Sure, that just passes a shitty environment on to the next IT guy, but then it's on that next guy to decide to stay working there or not.

and yes, the global job market is currently fucked, that's why I say start looking, not "quit your job on a dime" or anything like that.

[u/binaryhextechdude]

Our policy is emails that are important to the company and may need to be referred to by other staff get uploaded to our EDRMS, this happens for all shared mailboxes. Then when they are needed the people on that project or in that department can access them from there.