Finding and exporting your Google Drive data

What it holds

Google Drive holds uploaded files and Google-native documents, spreadsheets and presentations in personal and shared drives. Folder structure, sharing information and retained revisions provide context that a simple download may not preserve.

Where Google Drive shows the size

1. Sign in to admin.google.com as a super admin, or an admin with Storage and Reports privileges.
2. Open Storage and hover over the chart to see how much of the total is Drive.
3. On the same page, open the full list of shared drives ranked by storage.
4. For users, download Reporting, User Reports, Accounts with all columns and total Drive storage used (MB).
5. Add the shared drive total to the user total and divide by 1,024. Numbers may lag by up to a day.

Plan and admin role. Any Google Workspace edition. Storage privilege for the Storage page, Reports privilege for the Accounts report; super admins have both.

Exporting the full history

1. Use a super admin account at least 30 days old with 2-Step Verification; contact Google first above 1,000 users.
2. Open Data, Data import & export, Data export and set up a new export.
3. Choose all user data for the whole organisation. Only this scope includes shared drives.
4. Start it and allow around three days, up to two weeks. Files land in a Cloud Storage bucket as ZIPs per service.
5. Copy the Drive archives out within 60 days, before Google removes them.
6. For Office formats and a record of who had access, export Drive from a Vault matter instead.

Google-native files (Docs, Sheets, Slides) are converted on export; check which formats you get.

Most editions can run a full Data export only once every 30 days.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.