What Happens to Google Drive
Files When You Migrate to Microsoft 365?

Where Drive content actually lands

Google Drive doesn't move to one single Microsoft 365 destination — content splits based on how it's organised:

• My Drive (personal files) migrates to OneDrive for Business, one destination per user.
• Shared Drives (team content) migrate to SharePoint Online document libraries, typically one library per Shared Drive or team.

Getting this split right matters — content that lands in the wrong destination tends to get reorganised twice: once during migration, and again later once people notice files are in the wrong place for how the team actually works.

What happens to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google's native file formats aren't directly compatible with Microsoft Office, so they're converted during migration: Google Docs become Word documents, Sheets become Excel workbooks, and Slides become PowerPoint presentations. The conversion is generally reliable for standard formatting, but documents with complex layouts, embedded add-ons, or Google-specific features (like live-linked Sheets charts) are worth spot-checking after migration rather than assuming a perfect one-to-one conversion.

Permissions don't carry across automatically in a compatible form

Google Drive's sharing model and SharePoint/OneDrive's permissions model are structured differently. Migration tools map Drive sharing settings to their closest Microsoft 365 equivalent, but this is an approximation, not an exact copy — external sharing links, in particular, need to be checked post-migration since link-based sharing behaves differently between the two platforms.

Version history

Google Drive keeps a version history for files, and depending on the migration method used, this history may or may not carry forward in full. This is worth confirming specifically if your organisation relies on rolling back to previous versions of key documents — it's not something to assume works identically without checking.

What to check before you migrate

• Storage volume per user and per Shared Drive — helps size the migration and flag any users approaching Microsoft 365's storage limits.
• File and folder naming. SharePoint and OneDrive have character and path-length restrictions that Google Drive doesn't strictly enforce — a pre-migration scan commonly surfaces names that need fixing first.
• External sharing links that need to keep working post-migration, since these often need to be regenerated rather than automatically carried over.
• Add-ons and integrations connected to Drive (e-signature tools, project management apps) that will need reconnecting to SharePoint/OneDrive afterward.

For the full migration picture beyond just Drive content, see our complete Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migration guide, or explore our Google Workspace migration service.