Guide
There are three realistic ways to do this, and the right one depends on how much you have and how much of it is Google Docs. This guide walks through all three in plain language, with no command line involved.
For a small Drive this is genuinely the simplest option, and it's worth doing before anything more elaborate.
What to expect: Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are converted to Word, Excel and PowerPoint files during the download. Simple documents come through fine; complicated spreadsheets can lose formulas or formatting. Files other people shared with you are not included — they belong to their owners.
Most people don't know this exists: Google's own export tool can send your Drive directly into your OneDrive account, without anything passing through your computer.
Google then builds the export in the background — minutes for a small Drive, many hours or a day or two for a large one — and uploads the zip files into a Google Takeout folder in your OneDrive. You'll get an email when it's done.
What lands in OneDrive is a set of zip files, not your folder tree. You still need to unzip them — either download each one to your computer, unzip, and drag the contents back into OneDrive, or use the OneDrive desktop app so they sync down, unzip locally, and sync back up.
For 20 GB that's a minor chore. For 500 GB it's a full day of your computer working, and it's where most people give up and leave the archives sitting as zips.
If you have a lot of data, a lot of Google Docs, or files other people shared with you that you actually need, the two methods above turn into a long weekend. A transfer service connects to both accounts and copies directly between them, so nothing goes through your computer and there's nothing to unzip.
That's what DriveFerry is built for. You connect your Google and Microsoft accounts, tell us what to move, and we run the transfer — for as many days as it takes — and send you a report listing what arrived, what was converted, which shared files were included, and anything that needs a second look. It's a flat one-time price, and early access is open now with a founder discount.
See DriveFerry →Whichever method you used, don't delete anything on the Google side yet. Transfers can report "done" with files missing, and you won't notice until you go looking. Give it 30 days, and check these seven things first:
7 things to know before moving files between cloud services →
Method 1: under an hour for a small Drive. Method 2: Google usually finishes the export within a day, then add your unzipping time. Method 3: depends on size; a service will give you an estimate upfront. Very large archives take days with any method — cloud providers limit daily transfer volume.
They'll be Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, which OneDrive and Office open natively. Formatting in plain documents survives well. Complex spreadsheets — lots of formulas, linked sheets, scripts — should be checked by hand afterwards.
Check that your OneDrive plan has room. Free OneDrive is 5 GB; Microsoft 365 Personal includes 1 TB. If your Google Drive is bigger than your OneDrive quota, the transfer will stop when it's full.
Not with Takeout or a plain download — those only include files you own. You'd need to copy shared items into your own Drive first (right-click → Make a copy), or use a service that handles shared files.
Not right away. Keep it for at least 30 days after you're confident everything arrived. Downgrade the storage plan if you're paying for it, but leave the account alive as a safety net.