How to migrate from Google Drive and Google Workspace to Nextcloud
Move Google Drive, shared drives, calendars and contacts to self-hosted Nextcloud with single sign-on: export options, sharing, cut-over and what to plan for.
Moving from Google Drive to Nextcloud is a common first step for organisations that want their files in a location they choose, under a contract governed by their own law. Copying the bytes is the easy part. What takes planning is everything around them: native Google documents that have no file behind them, sharing built up over years, and people who open files from bookmarks rather than folders.
This guide covers a Google Workspace migration the way we run it, from the export options to the day the old drive goes read-only.
What changes and what stays the same
Nextcloud covers the file, calendar and contact parts of Google Workspace. Files sync to desktop and mobile clients, and documents open in the browser through an office suite such as Collabora Online or ONLYOFFICE. Nextcloud is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence.
| Google Workspace | In Nextcloud |
|---|---|
| My Drive | Personal files |
| Shared drives | Team folders (Group folders app) |
| Docs, Sheets, Slides | Office files, edited in the browser |
| Google Calendar | Nextcloud Calendar (CalDAV) |
| Google Contacts | Nextcloud Contacts (CardDAV) |
| Google Meet, Chat | Nextcloud Talk |
| Google sign-in | Single sign-on through Keycloak or Entra ID |
| Gmail | A separate mail service, with Nextcloud Mail as an optional web client |
Step 1: inventory the Google side
- Export the user list from the Google Admin console, with each user’s Drive storage use. It tells you the total volume and the few accounts that hold most of it.
- List the shared drives, their members and their size.
- Read the sharing. Use the Google Drive API or a reporting tool to list files shared with external addresses, files shared by public link, and folders shared with groups. This list drives Step 4.
- Identify native documents. Count Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms. Forms and Apps Script do not have a direct Nextcloud equivalent and need a decision each.
- Note the integrations. Apps connected to Drive through OAuth, and any scripts that read or write files.
Agree now what is out of scope. Old projects are often archived rather than migrated.
Step 2: set up Nextcloud and single sign-on
Before any data moves, users need accounts that follow your directory.
- Connect Nextcloud to an identity provider over OpenID Connect or SAML. Keycloak can federate your existing directory, or Nextcloud can sign in against Microsoft Entra ID. Either way, a leaver loses access to files the day their account is disabled.
- Create groups that match your teams. Team folders, quotas and shares hang off them.
- Size the storage. Object storage suits large volumes; plan headroom above the inventory total for versions and trash.
- Connect the office suite and test a Word, Excel and PowerPoint file in the browser.
With Pilae, Nextcloud runs on your premises or on dedicated machines in any of 12 Pilae Cloud regions, six of them in Switzerland and the EU, and identity services set up the sign-on.
Step 3: choose how to copy the files
Three routes are in common use. Large migrations often combine them.
Google Takeout and the Workspace data export
Each user can export their own Drive through Google Takeout, and Workspace administrators can use the Data Export tool in the Admin console for the whole organisation, depending on edition. Takeout lets you choose the export format for Docs, Sheets and Slides. The result is a set of archives that you unpack and upload. It works, but it is a snapshot, it goes through a download and an upload, and it does not carry sharing.
The Nextcloud Google integration app
The Google integration app lets each user connect their Google account and import Drive files, calendars and contacts into their own Nextcloud account. It is a one-time import, not a sync, which suits a staged migration where each team moves on a set day.
A server copy with rclone
For large volumes and shared drives, a copy run from a server is the most controllable route. rclone reads Google Drive, including shared drives, through the Drive API and writes to Nextcloud over WebDAV. It converts native Google documents to the formats you choose, reruns incrementally, and logs every file. This is the route we use for the bulk copy, because it never touches a laptop and a second pass picks up only what changed.
Step 4: rebuild sharing deliberately
No tool maps Google Drive permissions into Nextcloud one for one, and you do not want it to: years of individual shares rarely reflect how a team should work today.
- Turn each shared drive into a team folder owned by a team, with the team’s group as members.
- Recreate internal shares that are still in use as Nextcloud shares to users or groups.
- For external shares, decide which should continue. Reissue them as Nextcloud share links with a password and an expiry date, and tell the recipients.
- Drop public links nobody has used. The sharing report from Step 1 shows which ones they are.
Step 5: move calendars and contacts
Calendars export as ICS files and contacts as vCard files, per user through Takeout or directly through the Google integration app. Nextcloud imports both, and phones and desktop clients then connect over CalDAV and CardDAV. Recurring events and attendees come across. Existing events keep their Google Meet links, which stop working once the Google accounts close, so recreate recurring meetings in Nextcloud Talk and set new ones there from cut-over day.
Step 6: cut over
- Pilot with one team. Move a team that uses Drive heavily, and fix what they find before anyone else moves.
- Run the bulk copy in the week before cut-over, while users keep working in Drive.
- Freeze. On cut-over day, set Drive to read-only for the teams moving, run a final incremental copy, and switch them to Nextcloud.
- Install the clients. Desktop sync and mobile apps, configured through your device management where you have it.
- Keep Google read-only for a few weeks as a reference, then close the licences once the last questions are answered.
Mail is a separate project. Plan it with the same freeze-and-switch pattern, over IMAP, on its own date.
After the move
Your files now sit in the country you chose, under a contract with a Swiss company, with the same versioning and trash users expect, and daily encrypted backups with a restore test every month. For organisations with residency obligations, that is the point of the exercise. See data residency for how locations are written into the contract, and the Google Drive alternative page for a feature comparison.
Let Pilae run the move
Pilae runs Google Drive and Workspace migrations to Nextcloud at a fixed price agreed before the work starts: the inventory, the sharing map, single sign-on, the bulk copy and a staged cut-over, followed by operation of Nextcloud with backups, monitoring and updates. See migration services.