Migrating/merging Google accounts; who's done it?

[TekNinja81]

Hey folks,

I've read some instructions online on how to migrate the contents of a Google account to a new one, but I'm quite hesitant to do so myself as I'm worried I'll lose and/or corrupt data somewhere along the way. Most important to me is my Contacts, but I'd like to retain any old emails and such that have been associated to the old account; I'm not real worried about Google+ as I've barely used it to date.

My understanding is that there's no way of transferring Play Store purchases/apps though, which is a big problem for me as I've got over 100 apps, and a number of key paid ones from that. I'd much rather avoid having to re-purchase any apps if I intend to completely ditch the old account, but this stipulation seems likely to halt that thought. I suppose I could keep that account active and use it solely for my App purchases, but I'd really much rather consolidate everything to one single account.


Have any of you gone through this process personally, and if so did you run into any problems along the way? What exact steps/procedures did you follow, and what data if any were you *not* able to move? I would really appreciate any help that can be offered, even in the form of links to a tried and proven migration method, as I've read a few different "methods" that seemed to vary considerably.

I really wish you could simply "rename" a Google account/address and make life so much simpler... hehe.

 

[Zooks64]

I moved from an old account to a new one last spring. It is not for the faint of heart.

It can be done but, and this is as big but I cannot lie ;-) you can't move apps purchased from one account to another. You will still have to log into the old account to have access to those apps. You don't have you sync anything else if you don't want to.

Gmail: I used gmvault to backup and restore all my email from the old account.

Picasa: There is a move option but only if you don't exceed the 1gb free storage. If you purchased extra storage then you have to download all your photos and reupload to new account.

G+: Allows you to migrate settings to new account but only once.

Contacts & Calendar: You can export/import contacts and calender events from one account to the other.

Music: Just log into the new account and it will upload all of you music again.

YouTube: I assume you have to upload videos again. I haven't bothered with that. I had nothing critical on there.

Google Voice: you can migrate a number to another account. I think this can only be done once.

There is no shortcut way to do this and you should plan on running both for a while.

Also, you will have to factory reset android devices to remove old account from device and set new account as main account.

Yes, it is a huge PITA, but worth it.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

[anon(818769)]

Hey man sorry to dig up an old post, but did you ever go through with this? I'm in the same situation right now and I can't really find personal experience anywhere online.

 

[TekNinja81]

Hey man sorry to dig up an old post, but did you ever go through with this? I'm in the same situation right now and I can't really find personal experience anywhere online.

I did, and it was definitely a bit of a hassle. I wound up exporting and importing, and/or using all of the Google provided tools on each respective service, to get all my stuff over.

What complicated this, was data being present from multiple accounts.

First problem was getting my Contacts to sync over properly. Upon Importing them from my old account, all those contacts went into an "Imported Contacts" group, which was easy enough to remove. But for some reason I kept failing to sync properly, and some contacts kept reverting to previous info.

I had originally just removed my old Google account from each device, but this wasn't enough. I ended up having to do a factory reset to fully correct this issue, but deleting the Data/Cache from the Contacts app sort of helped first. I also wound up installing a Contacts Sync Fix app which monitors for issues -- apparently some data gets lost or corrupted during migration, and this causes Google sync to fail.

The next thing was my Calendar entries. For some reason Time Zone info didn't migrate, so I had to manually correct several entries as they were showing off by several hours. I think I found a universal setting afterward that would've saved me a lot of trouble though, lol.

Hope this is of use, let me know if any other questions.