Whether you’ve outgrown your college email address and you want a professional one, or you want to change your firstname.maiden account to firstname.marriedname one, we’ve got you covered with a start-to-finish Google migration guide.
So much is contained within a Google account–emails, photos, files, contacts, your personal calendar, etc.—you probably don’t want to walk away from it and start over just for a new account name. In this tutorial we’re going to walk you through transferring every single transferable element of your old Google account to your new account in order to save you from re-entering all your old data or, worse, losing it.
In order to follow along with every section of the tutorial you’ll need the following things.
- The login and password for your old and new Google accounts.
- Optional (but highly recommended): A computer with two web browsers (or a browser that supports private browsing/incognito mode) so you can log into those accounts simultaneously
For the section detailing how to migrate your Gmail emails, attachments, and chat logs you’ll need:
- A free copy of the open source email client Thunderbird.
It’s possible to perform the steps in the Gmail backup-and-restoration section without Thunderbird using a different IMAP capable email client, but the process with Thunderbird is so easy (and there’s even a helper extension) that we cannot recommend it enough.
- What Do I Need to Know?
Before we proceed, there are a few things you need to be aware of that are so important they merit more emphasis than just a little note at the bottom of the prior section.
Although Google has introduced some really great improvements to the portability of data in their services and even mechanisms for directly transferring content from one account to another in some cases, there is no simple one-click process for dumping the contents of one Google account into another.
Furthermore, some of the processes used to transfer data from one Google account to another are destructive in that once you authorize Google to transfer the account data from your old account to your new account, it is permanently removed from the old account. At any point that you will be performing a one-way transfer of data, Google will warn you multiple times before it takes effect.
That said, we’ve used this entire battery of techniques to migrate multiple Google accounts and never had a single hiccup in the process (big or small). Still, read carefully and always make sure you’re working from the old account to the new account (and never in reverse).
