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I need to transfer data (files and folders) to SharePoint Online and OneDrive as we do our office 365 migration. Currently, we are looking at Sharegate but the price and amount of work involved are a bit more than we want to spend in terms of budget. Was hoping to find something a lot more straightforward.

My colleague suggested your helpful site to me and others. I hope to find help here

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(davecork) 2

If you’re doing a simple forklift migration, you can navigate OneDrive and SharePoint via Windows Explorer. This will allow you to use copy/paste, batch files, scheduled tasks or whatever. Best of all, it’s free.

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The real question is how many users (mailbox), how many folders and size of the data ?

Then what is your proficiency on O365 migration ? Most people use tools so they do not need to become experts for a one-time migration as it is usually the troubleshooting that takes up most of the time & effort.

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mover.io is free to use if you are just moving data. This will give you the same power to move data as ShareGate, but the SharePoint sites would need built first. Mover is simple, and straightforward.

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@adrianyong4136 ​

Good point and agreed on becoming learning to become experts for one time then it is no longer needed. In our case, our user mailboxes are done by third-party consultants and they are paid to get that project completed.
For data migration to OneDrive and SharePoint is a different deal. We cannot have the consultants do it as we cannot abide by a certain time frame and the bill would be very expensive for them if we prolong the project. We will need to work with different departments and different users to manage the data migration. Thus, we need to do it ourselves.

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There are always alternative…

We usually split these into 3 parts…

  • SharePoint (or Intranet portal)
    This part may need professional services unless you are expert in SharePoint (Cloud vs on-prem)

  • OneDrive
    This is may take long time if users have lots of files. But there are workarounds…like get a Synology NAS, backup files then “restore” to OneDrive using home Internet (usually much faster than office, choose someone with 300Mbps or 500Mbps or even 1Gbps Internet.

  • Exchange Online (email part of O365)
    There are tons of tools to migrate on-prem to Exchange Online. As long as users do not need to migrate pst files etc, can be done quite easily and fast. some people go into Hybrid Exchange to sync on-prem to Exchange Online then break off the “Hybrid”.

For me, I chose to move to G-Suite as it is always easier to move cross brands (I just chose the cloud with more tools). If you compare Exchange Online (coz we still use MS Office 2016/2019) vs G-suite (with MS Office 2016/2019) and find that you save $500 per year but spend $10,000 on migration…makes no sense right ?

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One more option to dramatically speed things up is to migrate the whole file server to Azure first using P2V https://www.hyper-v.io/migrating-cloud-easy-experience-choosing-p2v-converters/ or Azure Migrate https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-migrate/ and after all the data is in the cloud, start moving them to OneDrive/SharePoint. According to my experience, that goes much faster compared to migrating data from on-premises to the cloud file-by-file.

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There are different tools in the market that you could use. We used to use sharegate for sharepoint which worked very well but it needed a lot of trial and error to get it to work right. It does so much. You do pay for those bells and whistles it offers. I do not think they offer OneDrive migration though. Sharegate offer many sharepoint migration features. So if that is something you need beside files and folders, you should examine them

If your only need is to copy files and folder only, then check out GsRichCopy, they have a connector for OneDrive and sharepoint. Simply point the source to your data folder and the destination to OneDrive or SharePoint and kick off the jobs. It was straightforward. Their standard version will do the job.

You could also try to Mount them as windows folder but we had many issues with copying several files. Sharegate and GsRichCopy performed well with large file migrations. Mounting windows explorer is easy but not for large or many small files.

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@supaplex ​ I like this idea, looks intelligent

I will check with my team on how to apply this!

Totally free or we will have to pay in one of the execution stages?

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@adrianyong4136

Right, this would blow the mind

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@liamfox ​

Both OneDrive and SharePoint?

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If you mean ,Is it work with OneDrive and SharePoint ? Yes

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You will have to pay for the virtual machine time and storage during the period when it’s up and running in the Azure. Depending on the amount of data, that stage should not take long and thus not be very expensive. If you are a current Microsoft customer, you should have some Azure bonus credit that may cover those expenses completely. At least when you say about your migration plan to Microsoft salespeople, they will gladly offer you some.

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If your only need is to copy files and folder only, then check out GsRichCopy, they have a connector for OneDrive and sharepoint. Simply point the source to your data folder and the destination to OneDrive or SharePoint and kick off the jobs. It was straightforward. Their standard version will do the job.

@liamfox ​ it was an excellent piece of advice with the lowest cost