Can I migrate from a personal Dropbox account?

Not with this service. It needs a Dropbox business account and a Dropbox team admin to authorise the connection. A personal account has to be added to the Dropbox team first, or the user moves their own content, for example with Drive for desktop.

What happens to our Dropbox Paper docs?

They are not imported. Export them from Dropbox first as .docx or .md, then upload them into the shared drive where they belong. On the older Paper release the team admin exports all active docs by turning Paper off; docs in the trash are not included.

Does the migration change or delete anything in Dropbox?

No. The import reads from Dropbox and leaves the source in place, which is why you can run a full pass while people are still working. Note that a later delta run does not delete files in Drive that were deleted in Dropbox, so plan a read-only freeze before the final pass.

Dropbox to Google Drive migration: what moves, what doesn't

The folder nobody owns

Say a 30-person architecture studio decides to move to Google Workspace. Mail is the part everyone worries about. Files are the part that actually hurts, and it usually surfaces two weeks later: a project folder that used to live in one person's Dropbox is now in that person's My Drive, so when they take a holiday nobody else can reach the drawings. The folder was never properly shared in Dropbox either; it just sat in an account the whole team had a link to.

A Dropbox to Google Drive migration is not really a copy job. The importer moves the bytes reliably enough. What it cannot do is decide who owns each folder afterwards, and that decision is most of the work. Here is what we check first, where each kind of content lands, and what the importer skips completely.

Which Dropbox accounts Google can import, and the size where the plan changes

The tool is the data migration service in the Google Admin console, under Data, then Data import and export. Before anything else, five conditions have to hold. All of them come from Google's own admin documentation, checked 23 October 2026.

A super administrator has to set up and run the migration. Google states that resellers cannot run it on a customer's behalf, so there is no version of this where you hand the console to an outside party and walk away.
The source has to be a Dropbox business account, and you need a Dropbox team admin available for the authorisation step.
Every destination user needs a Workspace account that already exists and holds a licence. The service does not create accounts from migrated data, and an unlicensed user cannot reach their files once they arrive.
Shared drives have to exist before the run for anything coming out of a Dropbox team folder, and Drive has to be turned on for each target user.
One run covers up to 150 Dropbox users or team folders. Past that you start another run. There is also a ceiling of 500,000 Dropbox items per destination user.

That last number is the one that changes the shape of a project. The service went generally available on 5 January 2026, and the batch limit moved from 100 in the open beta to 150 at that point. For a studio of 30 people it is a single run on a Friday night. For 400 staff it is at least three runs, which means deciding which departments go in which batch.

To build the input you need a Dropbox email address for every user and a path for every team folder. Those come out of Dropbox's own member data report and team storage report. Export them rather than typing them: a single mistyped path is a folder that silently does not arrive.

Where each folder lands

There are two destinations, and the split follows Dropbox's own structure: personal folders go to the mapped user's My Drive, team folders go to a shared drive or to a folder inside one. Permissions are translated rather than copied, because the two products do not use the same roles.

Dropbox item	Where it lands in Google	What to know
Personal folder	My Drive of the mapped user	Owner stays owner, editor stays editor, viewer stays viewer
Team folder	A shared drive, or a folder inside one	The shared drive has to exist first; `editor` becomes Content manager, viewer stays viewer
Link set to anyone with the link, or to team members	One shareable link on the Drive item	Drive allows one link per item, so where several Dropbox links point at the same file the most restrictive setting wins
Link set to only people invited	Added as a direct user permission	The link itself does not carry over; where there are several, the highest access level is kept
Dropbox Paper doc	Not imported	Export from Dropbox as `.docx` or `.md` and upload it yourself
Previous versions of a file	Not imported	Only the latest version arrives; version history stays in Dropbox
File under a Blocked Download policy	Not imported	Lift the policy in Dropbox before the run, or move the file by hand
Item owned by an external user or an app	Not imported	Have ownership transferred inside Dropbox first, or take a copy from a team account

The two link rows are where expectations and reality part company. A folder shared outward three different ways over five years collapses into one Drive link, and the rule that resolves the conflict differs by type: most restrictive for ordinary links, highest access for only-people-invited ones. Re-check anything shared with a client, a contractor or an auditor by hand.

What the import leaves behind, and what we do about each

Four gaps, and each one needs a decision before the run, not a surprise after it.

Dropbox Paper

Paper docs are not imported, and for many teams this is the real content: meeting notes, project logs, the onboarding doc. Dropbox can export them. On the current Paper release a user exports the docs they created from the Paper section of dropbox.com and picks .docx or .md. On the older release a team admin exports by turning Paper off, which exports all active docs owned by team members and emails a download link; docs already in the trash are not included. We run the Paper export as its own step before the file import and land the results in the shared drive they belong to. One warning: Dropbox documents the .docx export as compatible with Microsoft Word, so expect some tidying when those files open in Docs.

Previous versions

Only the latest version of each file is imported. If a client depends on version history for a contractual or audit reason, that history stays where it is. Keeping the Dropbox subscription alive in a read-only state for an agreed window is far cheaper than trying to reconstruct it in Drive.

Blocked downloads and files owned by outsiders

Files under a Dropbox Blocked Download policy are skipped, as are items owned by an external user or by an app. The second one catches people out on shared project folders: a drawing a consultant uploaded is owned by the consultant, so it is not the client's to migrate. The fix is a conversation, not a setting. Ask for ownership to be transferred inside Dropbox before the run, or have someone on the team take a copy.

Permissions for people who are not in the mapping

If an internal user or group is missing from the mapping file, their permissions are not migrated. The files arrive; the access does not. Contractors, shared service accounts and the group that handles invoices are the usual casualties, which is why we build the mapping from the Dropbox member report rather than from the org chart.

Designing the shared drives before the move

This is the step that pays for itself, and the one most often skipped in favour of a one-to-one copy of the Dropbox tree. Team folders are usually shaped by history: who created what, in which year. Shared drives have hard limits that reward thinking once:

500,000 items per shared drive, counting files, folders, shortcuts and items in the trash. When a drive reaches the cap it stops accepting anything new until somebody permanently deletes items. Admins can see how close each drive is in the Admin console, under Manage shared drives.
600 members in total, groups and individuals combined, with up to 100 groups, and up to 50,000 people counted through those groups.
100 levels of folder nesting.

Google's own advice is to stay well under the item cap and split content across several shared drives instead of building one very large drive with deep folders. We use the Dropbox team storage report to see which folders are big enough to matter, then propose three or four drives that match how the business actually works: Projects, Finance, Operations, Shared resources. Each one gets groups as members, not named people. A drive owned by groups survives somebody leaving; one with 40 individual members becomes a permanent maintenance task.

The other half of the design is what does not become a shared drive. Content that belongs to one person stays in My Drive. Content nobody has opened in three years goes to an archive drive with viewer access.

The cutover week

The order we run, once the mapping and the drive design are agreed:

Full import, out of hours, with Dropbox still live and in use.
Read the report. Google's import report counts migrated and skipped items per user and folder. Reconcile every skipped item against the four gaps above. Anything that does not fit one gets looked at individually.
Close the gaps by hand: the Paper export, the externally owned files, the Blocked Download items.
Announce the freeze. From a stated hour, Dropbox is read-only for everyone. It needs a day's notice and a name attached to it.
Delta run to collect what changed since the first pass. One thing to plan for: a delta run does not remove from Drive what somebody deleted in Dropbox, so a deletion made during the freeze window has to be repeated by hand.
Spot-check with the people who use the folders daily, not with the admin. Ask three people to open the file they used most last week.
Only then revoke Dropbox access, and keep the subscription for the version-history window you agreed.

In most projects the file move happens in the same week as the mail move, and that is where the two halves trip each other up. Once MX records point at Google, every system that was sending mail as the domain through the old setup needs re-checking, including the ones nobody counted as senders. If you are doing both at once, settle authentication first: our order for the mail side is in changing MX records without losing mail, and the email migration page covers how the two tracks run together. Then confirm the domain still passes before the freeze lifts:

How Guanacos Tech helps

We run this end to end for small and mid-sized teams: the mapping file, the shared-drive design, the Paper and external-owner gaps, the import runs and the reconciliation. In English and Spanish, across North America and Latin America, on Workspace projects since 2018. If you want the file side planned before anyone clicks import, we work as Google Workspace consultants for teams your size, and the scope of the file side is on the file migration page. A 30-minute call is enough to produce the order of operations for your own folders and the list of things that will not come across.

Moving from Dropbox to Google Drive: what lands in My Drive, what becomes a shared drive, and what stays behind