Managing Google Drive Multiple Accounts: Everything You Need to Know

Plenty of businesses use the Google suite of tools— and specifically Google Drive— for a wide number of reasons.

It’s free (or low cost if you’re paying for the business tools), it’s easy to use, it’s got basic collaboration features, and it’s got plenty of storage.

Google Drive is great for creating content, but there are downsides to using it when you want to store and manage content. This becomes even more true when you’re looking at trying to manage multiple Google Drive accounts, which is what we’re going to talk about today.

Why Do Businesses Create Multiple Google Drive Accounts?

Many businesses rely on Google Drive accounts for multiple aspects of their business. It’s used widely, even though it’s admittedly not a perfect sales software solution.

And sometimes, businesses outgrow their drive for any number of reasons. They’ll just create a new drive and try to either work within both, or divide up the work between them.

And this can be complicated when you may have certain content siloed in different drives but you need functionality across multiple Google Drive accounts to do their work properly. Imagine trying to work on a single document in two different drives; you may have different teams working on different versions of the same document and getting frustrated when the edits aren’t showing up.

Examples may include creating multiple Google Drive accounts for the following reasons:

• Different teams have their own Google Drive accounts
• Different “sister companies” have their own Google Drive accounts
• The business runs out of storage on one (or is concerned about access and permissions) and starts another
• A business may have a Google Drive account meant for internal use, and one for external use
• Your business has acquired another, or vice versa, and each company had their own respective Drive accounts

So how exactly can this be managed? A good place to start is to consider syncing your Google Drives, but looking at alternative solutions is also critical.

How to Sync Multiple Google Drive Accounts

If you know that you want to sync multiple Google Drive accounts, we can show you how to do that. (As a note— make sure you read through the entirety of this post before deciding to proceed, however, because there are downsides and alternatives to consider).

So here’s how to sync multiple drive accounts on Mac and Android devices.

The easiest option is to start by downloading the Google Drive desktop app, which is available for both iOS and Android.

Next, you’ll login to your account on the Google Drive desktop app and enable the software to access your files. You’ll see two folders— your drive and your shared drives. You’re going to click on the drives that you want to sync to the new account.

Download the drives that you want to sync to the second Drive account.

Then, once you do this, go back to Google Docs. Add the second account to your Drive by clicking on your profile picture and then finding “Add another account” and signing in. This will allow you to move back and forth between both drives. Once you do this, go to the second account.

In the second account, find “Folder upload.” You’ll upload the entire folder(s) from the previous Drive that you want to share. After you do this, you can adjust sharing settings and organization as you see fit.

This process can be time consuming, but the good news is that you hopefully have to only do it once or twice and then you’ll be up and running, so long as you don’t need to create a new account in the future.

The Downsides of Syncing Multiple Google Drives

Before you actually start syncing multiple Google Drive accounts, it’s essential to consider whether or not that’s actually the right move. This will depend on why you’re planning on merging accounts, and whether or not specific risks could make it a bad idea for your business.

These are the downsides (and potential dangers) of syncing up data across multiple Drive accounts:

• There could be cross-contamination of data. We’re going to guess that you have plenty of mission-critical files stored in your Google Doc. Transferring them and syncing them up with another doc can cause cross-contamination of data. In theory, you could have multiple versions of a single document in different locations, causing chaos during an editing or creation process.
• Access and permission issues. When you sync up drives, you could end up granting access and permission to certain groups of people automatically, so this is something to be cautious of. You may not want all third-party vendors to suddenly have access to the files you’re uploading, but if you share your existing folder to a drive that they have access to, that’s what can happen.
  This can cause data leaks, data breaches, and proprietary information being given to anyone… including vendors, clients, and even employees without hte proper clearance.
• The potential for chaos is immense. Syncing up files from different drives can be chaotic and disorganized, especially at first. It will take your time an enormous amount of time to comb through the different files and putting them into correct folders and granting the right access and permissions. This is a lot of work considering you may run out of storage again or expand your business once more, and need to repeat the process down the line.

Why You Should Consider Alternative Content Management Systems

Here at Content Camel, we’re big fans of using Google Drive for initial content creation for all the reasons we’ve discussed so far: It’s easy to use, there are decent collaboration features, and you can share permissions with specific people during the creation process.

Using Google Drive to store and manage your content, however, leaves a lot to be desired–this post demonstrates a single example of why. For this reason, we recommend Google Drive alternatives when it comes to content management.

Keep in mind that your sales content alone typically includes videos, downloadable guides, podcasts, battle cards, and mountains upon mountains of written assets, some of which will be for internal use and some for external use. This content will span multiple digital locations, including Google Drives (and potentially multiple Drives!), your computer hard drives, and third-party sites like YouTube or review sites.

This is an enormous amount of diverse content, and you need an easy way to organize it so that your team can access it easily at any point, no matter how they go looking for it.

Content Camel was designed to solve this exact issue. We’re a sales-focused content management system that allows you to store all content of all types into a single, easy-to-search and easy-to-organize dashboard.

It’s collaboration-friendly, letting team members comment on different pieces of content to make requests. They can also create a “wishlist” so marketing can generate needed resources quickly.

And, the best part: We have multiple organization options, allowing you to tag content based on categories like stage of the sales funnel, internal vs. external use, and content type. You’ll be able to search for a specific piece of content or browse through your entire library based on specific tags.

Looking for sales battle cards? No problem. Looking for onboarding and training resources? You’ve got it.

See how our sales enablement content solution can help your team close more deals here:

Final Thoughts

Syncing your Google Drives really comes down to transferring the folders you want to share from one account to another. If you are going this route, consider cleaning up your original Drive folder first. This can mean:

• Ensuring no one has permission to content they shouldn’t (keep an eye out for ex-clients, past employees, or vendors you’re no longer working with); you don’t want them to have access even to outdated documents, especially if you aren’t carefully tracking them
• Getting rid of old or out of date content that you’ll never use or repurpose
• Organizing content into new folders that you plan to use in the new Drive, if relevant

And remember that while Google Drive is a great collaboration tool, storing the bulk of your sales resources— internal and external— in a content management system like Content Camel is an easy way to keep your content secure and easy to access all at once.

Want to get started with Content Camel? Sign up for free here!

Should I sync multiple Drive accounts?

There are reasons why you should sync Drive accounts, or at least transfer important data from one to another, including:

• Your teams previously worked in their own accounts and it’s creating data silos
• You’re merging companies, including all content assets