EDU Tenant - File Migration for OneDrive for Business

[Calvin Kissane]

After communication today from Fasttrack center EDU licenses except for Office 365 Education E5 are not eligible for onboarding support via Microsoft engineers (FastTrack Center).

Therefore i am now looking at methods by which we can migrate user home drives (4TB) in bulk into ODFB.

Previously i believe there was a method by which one could do this from within the admin console. After searching i can no longer find this.

Does anyone have any experience with this? how have you completed these bulk migrations? Have you used a script or external application that worked successfully. 

Cheers

[#2]

Hi Calvin,

It sounds like you want to migrate a bunch of content from a fileshare server, right?  Our University was in a similar situation over the summer and found ourselves without much help in merging two Edu tenants.  If you are moving content from a fileshare, though - that would be much more straight forward.

Here are some suggestions:

• There are third party tools that can help automate much of this.  I highly recommend Sharegate for this - it is affordable, reliable, and the team at Sharegate have great documentation.  I honestly can't say enough great things about this product.
• You'll need special permissions to access your users OneDrives.  It's much more than just being a global admin or SharePoint admin, and if you have a lot of users, you'll want to give yourself plenty of time to grant this access even using powershell.  Here's some instructions for scripting that:  http://www.jijitechnologies.com/blogs/add-remove-secondary-site-collection-admin-to-all-onedrive-for...
• Make sure to open a case with Microsoft to request an exception to throttling.  If you don't let them know you are migrating a lot of content, you could be waiting a lot longer than you need to be.
• It's going to take longer than you think.  It just is.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Best of luck, and happy to answer any questions that I can!

[#3]

Hey Adrienne Andrews

Thanks very much for your reply. You are absolutely right we want to migrate a bunch of content from our fileshare servers.

I will certainly checkout Sharegate, we have also been told about thinkscape with their files to go solution. They also have a product called ZeeDrive which will map ODFB and sharepoint as mapped drives on machines.

Thanks again.

Calv

[#4]

There was the Office 365 Import Service but a few months back the service no longer supports importing data to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business, either by using the drive shipping or the network upload method.   This service now only seems to support PST imports (buried in Security & Compliance/Data Governance/Import by the way).  Shame Microsoft took a step back from this very common workload.

Microsoft now recommends this method, which I think would work with OneDrive as well - Upload on-premises content to SharePoint Online.  I don't think anyone would be in a hurry to use this way for significant migration work but I could be wrong.  Sharegate is a great tool and it is economical, compared to similar products in the marketplace. 

You may have done this already but I'd take a step back and look at that 4TB of data, has it be pared-down already with a data cleansing exercise, as that's a lot of data (pointing out the obvious!).

[#5]

I would second the recommendation of ShareGate.  I used it with several clients.  It's a solid and very affordable product for doing SharePoint/OneDrive migrations.

[#6]

I would suggest to try DMS-Shuttle for SharePoint. It is a low cost solution, but there is a 15 days trial version: https://dms-shuttle.com. For students (a valid "education email" is needed) it is free.