Data Privacy Act - UK

For so long, as a sole trader, I have worked both my private and business life into one large Google Gmail account, extended to 1TB,  but as the impending data protection act looms on us all in the UK,  I have had to make some long overdue changes to both my private and business life and separate my contacts and client information.

Making that separation was, on paper easy, in practice I have had to sit down and make the physical break, by making my company, Konstrukshon Ltd, a Gsuite account and migrate all the data that's applicable over to this new domain. Simple enough, but believe me it's not so easy, even when you're dealing with a Gmail account and Google Gsuite. 

First off, it's creating the Gsuite account, this is easy, use the very helpful online, human, who will guide you through the process, this took about 40 min for me, looking up domain info of my existing Konstrukshon.co.uk account and using my providers Cpanel to update this account to send mail over to the new Gsuite account, together with redirecting my web page over to a google web site.

Adding my staff to this account was also so simple, and yes you may ask, we botched a system of sending mail from another Gmail account that made it look like a unified account, it worked !.

Next the migration, for all the drive folders full of both Google Doc's and other files like dwg, and specific CAD files, we tried migration, it simply did not work the way I wanted, so we ended up downloading files, and pulling them into the new folders as we wanted, it made us look at each file and sort out the crap and no longer good !. it took time but worth the effort.

Next mail, fortunately, I had separated all company from private on my Google account, and I also have a MacBook Pro as my main machine, here I just added the new Gsuite account and the older Gmail to Mac Mail and dragged  from one to the other, it took time, but once you drag across its simple, just give the Mac time to sort it out and make the transfer. Once complete and for me, that was over a full day and part of an evening, on completion, delete all accounts, you no longer need them on mac mail.

Yes, we did have a few stray files on Dropbox these were also simple to migrate to Gsuite. Adding Google Sync to my Mac allowed it to see the files like dwg cad files on the new Gsuite drive and open them up in Autocad. Adding team drive to Gsuite allowed multiple access.

So now it's just a learning curve on Gsuite, getting the staff migrated and learning how to use it.