Last spring, I was having some trouble with my email. I had my @funnelfiasco.com email forwarding to the Gmail account I’d been using since 2005 or so. But for some reason, every so often email would silently just not make it through. This nearly cost me the opportunity to be the technical reviewer for The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins (affiliate link). There was no real indication of what was going on, and since my friend graciously hosts my site for free, I didn’t want to push too hard. So I decided I’d just be Google’s customer instead of their product.
Here’s the kicker: Google doesn’t let you just become a paying user. So I created a G Suite account for FunnelFiasco, a “company” of one person. But this also meant that I couldn’t just magically promote my existing account. Instead, I had to migrate all of the data. This turned out to be mostly easy, but a bit of a pain in some regards.
Migrating
Chrome
Moving Chrome data to a G Suite account is very easy: you log out and log in with the new account. The main thing to remember is to not deleting the existing data when you log in with the new account. It’s that simple. If you have any payment methods stored, those are in Google Play, not in Chrome.
Voice
Moving Google Voice is less easy. You can’t import your history into the new account, which killed a lot of the value for me (that was part of the reason I decided to port my Google Voice number to my mobile carrier). You can export it and keep it locally, but that’s not entirely helpful. But once I made peace with that, I was able to transfer it to my G Suite account. However, the Google Voice support site says that’s not an option these days.
Contacts
It’s as simple as exporting from the old account and importing to the new. It took a little while for my imported contacts to show up, which led me to think the import failed. So I tried again. And then I had all of my contacts twice. So I deleted them all and imported again. This time I was patient, and it was fine. But if you switch the main Google account on your Android phone, you may be surprised when an edit to a contact doesn’t appear to be reflected on your phone (it’s still showing the old account’s version, too).
G Suite provides a data migration service for importing email. This worked very well, but very slowly. One of the benefits of Gmail, especially in the early days, was the bountiful storage space. Combined with usable search, it meant not having to delete email. So I had something like 383,000 emails in my account. This took about 10 weeks for the data migration service to import. There are probably faster ways to do this, but I didn’t really care. If I needed an old message, I could log in to the old account.
The data migration service does not move mail filters. Those can be exported as an XML document and reimported to the new account.
Calendar
I apparently didn’t take notes on this at the time, but I think what I did here was to add my G Suite account as a fully-privileged user for my consumer calendar. I had them both displayed and as I saw things that were owned by the old account, I moved them to the new calendar. Most of my calendar events are on the shared family calendar anyway, so making my new account an owner there was essentially no different.
Docs/Drive
As with the calendar, I had to add my new account as owner to the documents I still cared about. It’s an annoyingly manual process.
Other services
I didn’t have much data — if any — in other services (YouTube, etc), so I didn’t worry about that.
Life with two Google Accounts
In the end, I’m sort of stuck with having two Google Accounts. Most people don’t email me directly at my @gmail account because I’ve been using @funnelfiasco.com for so long. But the account still exists and I go check it every so often to make sure I’m not missing anything. The few people who use Hangouts Chat still mostly IM me at the funnelfiasco account, but occasionally they’ll slip up and use the gmail account.
G Suite is overkill for my needs, but it’s the only way Google will take my money. At some point, I’d like to extricate myself from Google to some degree. I know it’s possible, and I know many of the people who might read this post would strongly advocate it. But it’s also very convenient to use Google, and I’m aware of the trade-offs I’m making. I’m not interested in having that conversation.