Migrate Users personal File Share to OneDrive for Business

[Taen keren]

Hi 
Just want to hear your 'approach' to move your End-Users personal Files from the personal Fileshare to OD4B? 

• Did you use a 3 party product - and which one did you use? 
• What Settings (& GPOs) have you made for the Sync Client? 
• What and when - did you communicate to the End-users? 

[#2]

We used third party. Specifically BitTitan's MigrationWiz product. But, there are several others out there and many of them are very good. It really depends on your needs and the amount of data you are trying to migrate as to which solution works best for you. 

As for communication for the end users: I'm all for communicating multiple times with plenty of warning. Keep people informed of what is happening, when it is happening, what will change. Throw in some of the many online training resources. Even if they don't actually read/watch any of them you provided resources for them.

The technical part of this is relatively easy. It's the "soft" part - your people - that will probably take the most preparation and time.

[#3]

For migrating ODFB I would recommend Sharegate, You also have the free SharePoint migration tool

[#4]

When we finally "turn on" OneDrive for our users we'll have the users migrate their own files. It will provide a perfect opportunity for them to clean out the old junk that they don't need anymore.

[#5]

Hi Cary 

That sounds a bit tedious for the users.. :D 

Are their getting a 3 party tool or is it a 'one by one' move? 

[#6]

I wouldn't say tedious as they will drag the files from their network share "home" drive and into the OneDrive folder on their systems. A very simple operation.

[#7]

Hi Cary 

When you mention their OneDrive folder you mean they upload their files using the OD sync client? 
wouldn't that take (all the) disk space on the client PC ? 

[#8]

No. Right now users are limited to 2 GB of storage.

[#9]

Pls share any document or link for migration to OD4B from fileshare using sharegate,

[#10 · Accepted solution]

@Taen keren

We used Sharegate and depending from your legacy servers and data size first recommend is always the end user to do while they are only one who can clean data witch helps in the EU Compliance manner. Secondly ensure that you dont migrate ACE's from the legacy NTFS, while there is massive privacy risks if any admin Group is added full rights to the user Private OD4B, the issue is not there and is asis so far before someone put cloud licenses user to those admin groups and then Office Graphs, Delve and search start to work and then you are in deep ….t. Trust me seen that.

Sharegate is cheap but there are more cost and better tools.

Think also how you manage the homefolders during migration and how those are mapped to users profile, login script or GPO while when you start the copy you should make the folders read only and after copy rename so that user cannot see and that the drive mapping is removed, otherwise there is risk that you need to do delta migration for the changes and new files. 

In Windows 7 we noticed that folder redirector can be quite tricky if pointed to use home folder in the Network witch means that even if you remove the drive map the folder redirector can Still point to the same Network path so be familiar with this.

Also there is possiblity to offline usage at the Windows level that brings new cool thing you need to resolve and the issue with hard drive, Windows 7 does not allow dynamic sync like Windows 10 what you need to recongnize in communication if there is no space enough on the Workstation.

and finally you might need to configure OD4B throttling via GPO while when migrating at the same time MS start to do throtthling at the tenant level meaning that user see this as very slow or "frozen" SharePoint online sites.

Cheers