Migrating a Google Workspace Account to a Personal Google Gmail Account
I suspect this will become something of a 'living document' as I update this with progress - since the effort required to migrate an old Google Workspace account to a 'regular' Google Gmail account is enormous and will likely take me a year or longer to complete.
I've had a free Google Apps for Your Domain account since they first arrived in 2006. And I was 'grandfathered' into a still-free Google Workspace account as Google's business offerings evolved. But I also now have a seven-year-old daughter, and I was getting tired of running into things that I could NOT do with a Workspace account - like use the parental controls of Family Link.
And so I decided to try and migrate from my eighteen-year-old Google Business account to a 'regular' Google Gmail account.
What I discovered took my breath away.
I consider myself to be a fairly technical person. I've worked in the IT and software development industry for over twenty five years, and so figured I'd have about as good a chance as anyone of 'migrating' a large archive of email and all of my other Google related account data to a 'normal' Google Gmail account. What I've ended up having to do is keep my Workspace account - at least for now, switching back and forth between this and my new personal Gmail account when I need to.
Here's why.
There is no 'official' way to migrate a Workspace account to a Gmail account.
It took me about a week to find a solution for exporting all of my email in .mbox format, and then importing it into my Gmail account. Google simply says that you can 'take away' your data, but that you should use a third-party service to import this into Gmail. Sorry Google, but I really don't want to give a third-party service access to my mail archive (I already have misgivings about Google having it). And so in the end I used this tool - produced by GAM called GYB (Got Your Back) While I love the fact this tool exists - it's not trivial to setup and use and requires a Google Cloud project and service to perform the restore of my exported .mbox email archive to Google Gmail. It took nearly 36 hours to complete.
Photos
I then needed to find a strategy for moving all of my Google Photos and Albums. Even with a paid plan for extra storage - this was also a complicated multi-step process that started initially with enabling 'partner-sharing' with my personal Gmail address, then 'keeping a copy of all photos' after ending partner sharing, and then an even more complicated series of steps where I shared each album with my personal account and then 'kept local' copies of these as well when I ended sharing. This took about three days to complete.
All the Rest
I'm now left with slowly moving, recreating, or abandoning all of my paid Google Play applications, my 'liked' YouTube video and subscriptions, my saved or favorite Google Map locations, my 'trained' Google News Feed, and of course any saved browser account passwords that I haven't kept in a separate and secure store. I'm not yet brave enough to remove my Workspace account from my phone.
Next
For me the biggest take away from all of this was the extent to which I had slowly become 'absorbed' into the Google ecosystem of products - which of course is exactly what Google wants. As for why this was all so difficult - we'll, I'm guessing it's because as far as Google is concerned, the number of Google Workspace users that want to migrate to Gmail is relatively small - a rounding error if that - and so not a priority for Google. What I'm really curious to know - assuming I'm able to complete all of this, is what will happen when I want to give my Photos and anything else I feel would be of value to my daughter after I'm dead and gone.
Welcome to the digital ('dark') age.