Project Objective
To move the shared folders from condo-storage to Google Shared Drives
Project Background
Condo-storage was originally created for satisfying the need for scientific data storage outside the Lawrencium Cluster. Many groups have shared folders that were on grouper and bass before and those were moved to condo-storage temporarily when grouper and bass were retired. The time has come to migrate all of the shared folders that came from grouper and bass off of condo-storage and over to Google shared drives.
Project Description
The Collaboration Team in IT will work with each group's point of contact for this migration.
The Collaboration Team will provide each group with a data usage report and permission reports for their shared folders to review. Items to consider:
Google shared drives have a 400,000 item limit (folders+files) so any folders that are approaching or over the limit will need to be broken up into 2 or more shared drives. (see data usage report)
Google shared drives have a folder depth limit of 20. (see data usage report)
Google shared drives do not work well with databases so if there are active databases, please inform the Collaboration Team and we can work on a solution for these
In the permission reports, there may be permission inheritance blocks that are highlighted in red. The inheritance blocks were probably set up many years ago and may not be necessary any longer. For any inheritance block that is still required, that folder will need to be moved into its own shared drive since Google shared drives do not support reducing permissions or blocking permissions at the subfolders. Permissions can only be increased at the subfolders.
The permission reports will also show the groups and group members that have access to the shared folders. There will likely be groups and users who do not need access anymore. This is a terrific time to clean up the access.
Google Groups will be used to manage access to the shared drives. Google Groups can be created from https://identity.lbl.gov/creategroups. Management will need to decide which person(s) will be responsible for managing the different Google Groups.
Once the new shared drive names and permission levels have been decided on, please fill out the sheet that is provided by IT with that information. We recommend adding a prefix to the shared drive names so they are grouped together and make these drives easier to locate. (e.g. EH-Technical Services)
The Collaboration Team can meet with the different groups pre and post migration to answer any questions users may have. The migration is done over a weekend. At 5pm on the Friday before the migration, the folders on condo-storage will be made read-only. The files on the Google shared drives will be available by Monday morning.
What’s Changing
VPN is not required to access the Google Drives
Permissions on condo-storage are managed by IT so if a person needs to be added or removed, a ticket has to be opened before IT will take that action. If a person should be removed but no ticket was opened for IT, then the account for that person will still have access to the data. When reviewing permission reports, there will likely be outdated accounts on the reports because of this reason. With Google shared drives, the permissions are managed by Google Groups and the manager(s) of Google Groups are the division's staff themselves so they can keep the group memberships much more up to date.
IT recommends Windows and Mac users install Google Drive for desktop. Google Drive for desktop allows Windows users to access the Google shared drives using File Explorer and Mac users can continue to use Finder. By utilizing File Explorer and Finder, users can access files just like how they are accessing condo-storage currently.
Since the data on condo-storage will still be available in read-only format for a month after migration, we recommend users use H drive for their Google Drive. If Google Drive for desktop is using a different drive letter than H, the drive letter can be changed following these instructions.
