Before diving into the step-by-step procedure of best practices for OneDrive migration, let’s have a quick sneak peek of the user’s query, just to understand the real-life situation here. In this article, we are going to discuss the OneDrive Migration Best Practices in detail.
User Query
My organization just acquired a smaller company and I have given this task to perform OneDrive migration. There are around 1300 GB of data, to migrate and thousands of files. Is there anyone who has used any easy way to do this task?
Please let me know the best practices for OneDrive migration
Scenario
Nowadays, the massive increase in consolidation & acquisition activities within organizations leaves them in the situation of data migration in Microsoft 365. However, Microsoft does not provide any specific tools or direct methods to carry out this operation, in this way it becomes a cumbersome task for their users. Hence, we have discussed the OneDrive migration best practices that you should follow to avoid any data loss.
Critical Steps You Should Follow to Successfully Migrate
No matter what the reason is for a user to want to migrate, this process can be complex for inexperienced individuals. There is so much that a user has to consider such as, what content needs to go at what place, what should be moved, how will you be able to move data from third-party cloud services, and much more. You also need to consider the time that the migration will take, and how will things be communicated to the rest of the team. To make this overwhelming process easier, we provide the steps you need in order to have a successful migration. Here are some of the points you need to consider:
- Migration Planning: You should consider your environment and plan moving your data accordingly. You should keep in mind the location of your data, the content that your team members are using, the access of certain sensitive files, the structure of the migration process, and what help you would need.
- Create a timeline: You can also create a timeline based on the files that you want to migrate on a priority basis. This is going to help you determine the deadline for the migration process to complete.
- Prepare your Environment: You can prepare your environment by sorting through all the files and keeping the ones that you’re going to need. You can also remove the content that you no longer use to make the migration take up less time and be less complex.
- Carry out the Migration process: Now, you can follow the steps given later in the article, to perform the migration process successfully.
- Onboarding of users: After the migration process is complete. You can ask the users to now start using the new environment, and access all their files and important data.
Here is the List of OneDrive Migration Best Practices That You Should Follow
Checkout OneDrive migration best practices that you should follow:
#1 Examine the Current Workload and Create a Planning
The Microsoft Office 365 suite has been used by businesses of all types for some time now, and when it comes to migrating this data, we need to be sure what data to migrate. There can be various types of data collected in OneDrive for Business. Therefore, it is one of the best practices for OneDrive migration to analyze the current workload and get an exact figure of what data needs to be migrated and what doesn’t.
#2 Determine The Migration Duration & Perform Risk Analysis
Setting a realistic deadline based on how much data you need to move and prioritize is always a great idea. By doing so, companies can decide on migration dates and deal with risks such as legal holds or eDiscovery issues. This will help them understand your days off, including holidays, important business meetings, and/or other event dates that they may want to consider when migrating your OneDrive data. Moreover, prior to the migration, it is crucial to create a backup of your data to ensure that you can restore your files if something goes wrong during the migration.
#3 Perform Test Migration
Before migrating your bulk organizational data, it is always a best practice to test the migration process with a small subset of data, just to ensure that it works as expected and to identify any potential issues.
#4 Choose The Right Approach/Method
Opting for a reliable and secure migration tool can ease the entire process and ensure data integrity and security throughout the process. Some organizations still use the traditional manual upload and download approach to transfer OneDrive data. They should be aware of the downtime associated with the manual method.
There are a few ways to carry out data transfer in Microsoft 365, we will cover the manual approach and the automated approach to achieve the same operation and will provide you with OneDrive migration best practices.
Can We Include the Traditional Approach of OneDrive Migration as the Best Practice?
In the manual method, you need to log into the source account and download all the data to your local computer. Then you have to upload it to your destination account.
Let’s discuss the step-by-step procedure for the same.
Steps to Migrate OneDrive Through Manual Approach
- Step 1. In the first step, you need to log in to your source OneDrive account
- Step 2. Now select all the desired files and folders and download them to your local computer.
- Step 3. After all this, log in to your destination OneDrive account.
- Step 4. In this account, you must upload all the downloaded files and folders.
You may find this method an easy one but the reality is different. This method has its limitations, you can not use this method for larger files and folders. It might show some syncing issues and this becomes an uphill task if you have massive data.
Limitations of Manual Method
- It can take a significant amount of time to copy and paste files from one location to another manually. Especially if you have a large amount of data to migrate.
- Users are always at a potential data loss risk. This can be due to human error while manually copying and pasting files, such as accidentally overwriting or deleting files.
- In the absence of a date filter or any advanced features, the manual method becomes less efficient.
- Moreover, it also does not support version control, access control, or collaboration. Eventually does not ensure data integrity or hierarchy.
- It does not support automation while downloading and uploading data. The process will have to be repeated each time for new files and new users added to the destination.
#5 Monitor, Troubleshoot, and Verify
It is one of the best OneDrive migration best practices to monitor the entire process. This step can also help you troubleshoot any issues that may arise. It further ensures a safe and secure data transfer. Once the migration is complete, then you should verify that all files have been migrated correctly.
Wrapping Up
Organizations must understand the downtime involved in data migration projects in Microsoft 365. Hence need to choose the right approach for it. Therefore, in this article, we have covered both approaches to accomplishing this task. And provided OneDrive migration best practices.
Users without any prior technical knowledge can also safely perform this migration project by using the above-given software hassle-free.