1

I would like to know the following:

How to migrate to OneDrive for Business from a file server on site

How to set up the structure and share the folders on OneDrive 365.

5 Spice ups
2

It’s a pain, but keep in mind, there are no backups like an internal file server.

3

We really need more information to give a better answer. How many users? How much data to transfer? How do you want to organize it (one central repository or sharing per user)? I’ll give some general info and considerations below:

Recognize first that OneDrive is NOT intended to replace your file server. SharePoint Online Document libraries are truly better for this, but if you have more than 1 TB of data plus 500MB per user you can run into space issues. The reason is that OneDrive is NOT centralized, it is designed for personal storage for that user that can then share with others.

There are several older articles about migrating over directly from Microsoft, but most are intended for when the old “Groove” sync client was being used and drastically limited your options. Even though the new client is much, much better, there are still some limitations.

That all being said, migrating the data is easy and a simple google search will reveal many methods. First is using Microsoft’s built-in import functions from Office 365 admin portal.

This may not even be necessary though since you can simply drag and drop files into a synched file location. So basically setup OneDrive sync client on a PC and copy the files to the synched location so they will sync back to Office 365. Maybe use robocopy if you want to keep directory timestamps.

4

We’re planning the same thing. We’re going to use OneDrive for the users ‘Home’ drives and then SharePoint Online for our Shared Areas. At the moment, we’re doing a few one by one bits so just dragging and dropping which seems to be the safest and easiest way to do this at the moment.

5

As for backups, we’ve found that this may not be necessary due to the amount of Recycle bins (I think one for each user and then an ‘Administrators Only’ one) but we are going to do more research in to this!

6

Hi, thanks for the detailed explanation.

We have around 1TB of data on a file server, this has around 35 shares top level, sharing across all different users and groups. We have around 70/80 people and I was hoping to find out how i can create the file structure on SharePoint.

I want to know how i can create the file structure and use my AD groups to share, we currently have a hybrid environment.

Firaz

7

This is exactly what I am intending to achieve in my environment, would you be able to help me understand how you have created the structure on SharePoint similar to a top level file share?

I’m just not understanding what account to use and how to do it all?

8

In our SharePoint Online site, I’ve just used a Document Library and then set up the folder structure to look the same as our file server and then used the AD groups to give permissions to the relevant folder. We’ve also done a bit of folder targeting so only the users with permission to that folder, can see it.

Another way to do it is to use this an opportunity to come up with a different file structure, depending on what your users want/need.

9

If users want to access these files offline how can this be done? I know in OneDrive ( newclient) you can just do right click available offline?

Also can you have mapped drives pointing to your sharepoint online or offline?

10

Are you able to help on this?

I am trying to lock users down so they can not see the different shares. I only want users to view the shares (folders) they have access to? Is this even possible?