How to leave Google Workspace without losing your mind

Deciding to leave Google Workspace is the easy part. Most people who've thought seriously about data sovereignty or GDPR compliance can see the argument clearly enough. The hard part is the migration. Years of email, documents, and institutional memory sitting in Google's infrastructure, and no obvious path to getting it out cleanly.

We've helped organisations through this process several times. The same mistakes come up repeatedly: trying to do everything at once, not testing before migrating, and underestimating the document conversion problem. Avoid those and it's genuinely manageable.

Here's the sequence that works.

Before you start: work out what you actually use

Google Workspace bundles a lot of things. Before planning a migration, spend a week paying attention to which parts you actually rely on:

• Gmail — almost certainly your primary concern
• Google Drive / Docs / Sheets / Slides — here is where work gets done
• Google Calendar — scheduling and shared calendars
• Google Contacts — often neglected, always important
• Google Meet — video calls
• Other Google services — Forms, Sites, Jamboard, etc.

Make a list. The things you use heavily are the ones to plan carefully. The things you barely use can wait or be dropped entirely.

Choose your destination before you start

You need to decide where you're going before you start moving. Trying to work this out mid-migration is painful.

For most organisations, the destination stack looks something like:

Email: A European mail host (Migadu is a decent recommendation for small organisations: good deliverability, reasonable pricing and no nonsense. Several other options (such as Proton for Business)exist. If you have the technical capacity and the privacy requirements to justify it, a self-hosted mail server can be the way to go.

Files and documents: Nextcloud with Collabora Online or OnlyOffice for document editing. This is the closest functional equivalent to Drive + Docs.

Calendar and contacts: Nextcloud also handles these via CalDAV and CardDAV, which sync with any standards-compliant client.

Video calls: Nextcloud Talk for internal calls; a hosted Jitsi instance for external calls. Neither is as seamless as Meet, but both work.

Get all of this set up and tested with a small group before you move anyone across.

Step 1: Export everything

Google Takeout lets you export all your data. Do this first, before you start the migration, as a safety net. Select:

• Gmail (MBOX format)
• Drive (includes Docs, Sheets, Slides converted to Microsoft formats)
• Calendar (ICS format)
• Contacts (VCard format)

A large organisation will generate a significant export. It'll arrive as a series of ZIP files. Download and store them somewhere safe as this is your insurance policy.

Step 2: Migrate email first

Email is the thing people miss most immediately if it goes wrong, so it's tempting to do it last. Do it first instead. It's the most self-contained piece of the migration, and getting it done removes the biggest source of anxiety.

The process:

1. Set up your new email host with your domain
2. Configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on your DNS — this is essential for deliverability
3. Run both systems in parallel for two weeks with the new host as primary
4. Import historical email from the MBOX export into the new host (most providers have an import tool; alternatively, use a desktop client like Thunderbird to drag-and-drop between accounts)
5. Once you're confident, remove Google as a fallback

The parallel running period catches anything you missed. Two weeks is usually enough; four weeks if you want extra confidence.

Step 3: Migrate calendar and contacts

These are the easiest parts of the migration. Export your calendars as ICS files from Google Calendar and import them into Nextcloud Calendar (or whichever CalDAV server you're using). Export contacts as VCards and import them into your new contacts system.

The main thing to check: shared calendars. If your team shares calendars for scheduling, make sure everyone knows the new shared calendar location and has it connected before you turn Google Calendar off.

Step 4: Tackle documents — carefully

This is the hardest part, and the one where people underestimate the effort.

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides use proprietary formats internally. When you export them via Google Takeout, they're converted to Microsoft Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). Those import into Collabora Online or LibreOffice reasonably well for simple documents, but complex formatting, embedded charts, and advanced spreadsheet features often don't survive cleanly.

The approach that works:

1. Audit your Drive. How many documents do you actually have? How many are actively used?
2. Prioritise ruthlessly. Most organisations have hundreds of old documents that nobody needs. Archive or delete them. Focus migration effort on documents in active use.
3. Convert and check the important ones manually. For your critical working documents, open the converted version and check it carefully. Fix formatting issues by hand.
4. Treat old documents as archives. Historical documents that you need to keep but won't actively edit can stay in their exported format — you don't need to convert everything to a new collaborative format.

Allow significantly more time for this step than you think you need. A small organisation might spend a weekend on it; a larger one might need several weeks.

Step 5: Decommission Google

Once everything is running on the new infrastructure and you've confirmed nothing is broken, you can cancel Google Workspace. Before you do:

• Check that all email aliases and forwarding rules are replicated in the new system
• Confirm that any third-party services that authenticate via Google ("Sign in with Google") have been migrated to alternative authentication
• Double-check that your DNS records are correct — MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC
• Keep the Google Takeout export somewhere safe for at least six months

What to expect

The first month after migration, people will occasionally wish they were back on Google. The document editor isn't quite as fast. The mobile apps are slightly different. Institutional muscle memory takes time to update.

By month three, it's usually unremarkable. The new system is just the system.

The thing that almost nobody expects: the sense of ownership. When your organisation's data is on infrastructure you control, with a provider you've chosen for principled reasons, it feels different from having it in someone else's cloud. That feeling is worth something.

If you'd like help planning or executing a migration, get in touch. We can help you work through the sequence, handle the technical setup, and make sure nothing gets lost.