Does Transferring Ownership of Files on Google Drive Free Up Storage Space?

I checked the first 5 search results and gave up and tried it for myself

Google Drive has a feature that lets you change the ownership of your files, allowing you to give them to another person or another account. I was wondering if this would also free up storage space for the person who was giving up ownership, but I couldn’t find anything online. My hypothesis is that yes, this does pass the storage burden to the new owner.

So, I set up an experiment to test it for myself.

Step 1: Upload a big file to account 1:

Fig 1: Shaw upload speeds are pitiful

Step 2: transfer to account 2 (you need to share with account 2 first):

Accept on account 2:

And… it worked:

So, my hypothesis is confirmed: transferring a files ownership transfers its storage burden too.

And there you have it, my daily contribution to the human knowledge bank. If I helped you out, please leave a follow, as Medium has kicked me out of the partner program :(