Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The primary steps include creating a dedicated “bucket user” for data storage, migrating email and Drive data from the departing employee to this bucket, and then deleting the old user account to reclaim the paid license.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
Managing staff turnover is a natural part of running a business, but many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaking money through their Google Workspace admin panel. For years, Google didn’t provide a clear path for data retention after an employee left, leading many to keep accounts suspended, which still consumes a paid license, or to pay for the “Archive User” feature. While the archive feature seems convenient, it effectively traps you into paying for data storage for every former employee forever.
Stop Paying for “Ghost” Users
The reality of staff churn is that over a few years, a growing business could end up paying for dozens of archived licenses. This adds up to a significant monthly expense for data that is rarely accessed. Instead of falling for this “scam,” small business owners should implement a proper offboarding process that preserves data while zeroing out the license cost.
The “Bucket User” Strategy
The most effective way to handle departing staff is to create a single “bucket account” within your Workspace. This account acts as a centralized archive for your entire company. Before deleting a departing employee’s account, you migrate their emails into this bucket and transfer their Google Drive files and calendar entries to a manager or the bucket user.
Implementation and Automation
While Google provides built-in migration tools, the process for emails remains manual and requires careful handling to ensure nothing is lost. For business owners who want to scale effectively without getting bogged down in technical tasks, having a standardized offboarding checklist is vital. This ensures that the moment a team member leaves, their data is secured, their license is reclaimed, and your IT bill stays lean.
Watch: Why Archiving Users in Google Workspace is a Scam!
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Full Video Transcription
Archiving users is a scam. My name is Pete Moriarty. I’ve been helping small business owners systemize, organize, and scale using technology and specifically Google Workspace for over 15 years. We work with a lot of businesses who use Workspace and have staff that they need to offboard once they’re done with their accounts. Now for a long time, Google didn’t really give you a good option to archive the data inside those accounts. We would have to do that manually for our customers using migration tools and basically moving the data to some kind of backup location before that user then was deleted. But Google have made things slightly easier in the last few years in that there are some semi-decent built-in tools to do that inside your admin panel. The reality is every user that you don’t delete is costing you money because it keeps a license active in your admin account. What many people do after staff leave is just suspend or change the password on an old user and just leave the account there, or even worse, they rename the account to the name of the new staff person who’s taking over from them. That person gets left with all the trash and old data and information of the previous user before them. The best practice is to properly offboard a staff member when they’re leaving your business. We’ve got people who leave a business and we go through what we call our offboarding process. I’ve made other videos on this on the channel and you can learn a bit more about the technical process on that, but in short, we recommend creating a bucket user in your account. This is effectively going to be the archive bucket for every user that leaves your business. So what you do is once you’ve set up the bucket or once you’ve set up that one single account where you’re going to put all of the data, if an employee leaves your business, you’re going to choose to migrate their data into that bucket account. Rather than keeping a user active, just keeping them suspended, still using a license, or using Google’s scammy archive user license which you’ve got to pay for in perpetuity, the best thing for you to do is to actually archive the data into your bucket archive and then you can delete the user and you free up a full license without paying anything ongoing. Now what tools do you use to archive that data? At itGenius, if you’re a Concierge member, we will do this automatically for you. It’s included as part of our plan and part of our price. If you want to pay us to do it just for one user, you can go to our website and grab a Quick Fix and we will archive one user for you. If you’ve got a high-profile user that’s important to archive properly, we can do the service for you. Or if you want to do it yourself, there is a method which I’ve outlined in our offboarding videos which involves using Google’s built-in migration tool to migrate the emails from the user account into the new bucket account that you’ve just created. Google then provides the option for your Drive documents, for your calendar entries, and for most of the other stuff that’s associated with that user to be automatically transferred to another account when you use the delete wizard, but the emails are usually the most important one and that does require a manual process to migrate those emails. Now once all of that migration has been done, you can safely delete the user. What Google’s trying to do here is to trick you into using an archive account that you have to pay for in perpetuity, which is fine if you’ve just got one or two people on those, but eventually you’re going to end up in a situation where all of your staff churn or turnover is just going to be archive accounts that you’ve got to keep forever. Me as a small business owner, I like to keep my data. I don’t want that data to ever be disappeared or deleted. Even if it’s something from 10 years ago, who knows, a customer might call me and say we want to sue you or can you tell us what happened on that project 10 years ago. I want to be able to go back to that data and so I want to keep absolutely everything inside my business. The archive user paid feature from Google is not the way. You want to properly offboard your staff, properly migrate their data, and then delete the account. If you want more help doing this, click on the link down below.
Why Archiving Users in Google Workspace is a Scam!
itGenius 🤓 Biz Tech Experts · 1.7k views
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
Managing staff turnover is a natural part of running a business, but many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaking money through their Google Workspace admin panel. For years, Google didn’t provide a clear path for data retention after an employee left, leading many to keep accounts suspended, which still consumes a paid license, or to pay for the “Archive User” feature. While the archive feature seems convenient, it effectively traps you into paying for data storage for every former employee forever.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The primary steps include creating a dedicated “bucket user” for data storage, migrating email and Drive data from the departing employee to this bucket, and then deleting the old user account to reclaim the paid license.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
Managing staff turnover is a natural part of running a business, but many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaking money through their Google Workspace admin panel. For years, Google didn’t provide a clear path for data retention after an employee left, leading many to keep accounts suspended, which still consumes a paid license, or to pay for the “Archive User” feature. While the archive feature seems convenient, it effectively traps you into paying for data storage for every former employee forever.
Q: Who is this guide for? A: This guide is specifically for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and growing businesses who want to manage their IT costs effectively while maintaining a secure and searchable history of company data.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The primary steps include creating a dedicated “bucket user” for data storage, migrating email and Drive data from the departing employee to this bucket, and then deleting the old user account to reclaim the paid license.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
Managing staff turnover is a natural part of running a business, but many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaking money through their Google Workspace admin panel. For years, Google didn’t provide a clear path for data retention after an employee left, leading many to keep accounts suspended, which still consumes a paid license, or to pay for the “Archive User” feature. While the archive feature seems convenient, it effectively traps you into paying for data storage for every former employee forever.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The primary steps include creating a dedicated “bucket user” for data storage, migrating email and Drive data from the departing employee to this bucket, and then deleting the old user account to reclaim the paid license.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
Managing staff turnover is a natural part of running a business, but many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaking money through their Google Workspace admin panel. For years, Google didn’t provide a clear path for data retention after an employee left, leading many to keep accounts suspended, which still consumes a paid license, or to pay for the “Archive User” feature. While the archive feature seems convenient, it effectively traps you into paying for data storage for every former employee forever.
Q: Who is this guide for? A: This guide is specifically for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and growing businesses who want to manage their IT costs effectively while maintaining a secure and searchable history of company data.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The primary steps include creating a dedicated “bucket user” for data storage, migrating email and Drive data from the departing employee to this bucket, and then deleting the old user account to reclaim the paid license.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
Managing staff turnover is a natural part of running a business, but many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaking money through their Google Workspace admin panel. For years, Google didn’t provide a clear path for data retention after an employee left, leading many to keep accounts suspended, which still consumes a paid license, or to pay for the “Archive User” feature. While the archive feature seems convenient, it effectively traps you into paying for data storage for every former employee forever.
