Forum Discussion
Moving or Copying Files: Painfully Slow, Loss of Data
If you're using "Open in Explorer" I think that may be part of the issue, and I'm assuming that you're using Internet Explorer. From personal experience I never really got on with the piece of functionality. It worked well back in 2007 when I first used it, but now there are much better options available.
Option 1 - Move To
When you visit a document library in the modern experience, you can click on the ellipsis against the document and select move to (see attachment "Modern-MoveTo.docx". In Figure 1, you can see the option to move to, and then in Figure 2 you can see that you have a number of options to either move it to OneDrive for Business or to another SharePoint site. When I tested this with a document of approx 1mb it took about 5 seconds to get itself warmed up and then do the move.
Option 2 - OneDrive Sync
The alternative option which has been mentioned before is to use sync (see attachment Modern-Sync.docx). In Figure 1, you can see the ability to Sync your library to your local file system using the OneDrive Sync Client. By hitting the sync button, you'll see it connect to your sync client (Figure 2), and then it will be available from your Windows Explorer windows (Figure 3). Once it's been synced, you can copy and paste documents between synced libraries in the same way as you would with normal files. Again this took only a few seconds to copy, paste and sync between the libraries.
I hope this approaches are useful and that they work. If not, please let us know and we'll see what else we can come up with.
Hi
I'm still looking for the optimal way of transferring the content of a document library between sharepoint sites.
I'm using Sharepoint Online (Office 365). The originating document library is a modern experience library and belongs to a modern experience team site which is a subsite of a modern experience communication site collection. The receiving document is also a modern experience library belonging to a modern experience teams site, a subsite of a modern experience team site collection. The content consists of multiple files and folders (numbers in thousands but always less than 5000 per folder). Individual files can be very large (a few gigabites) and the total size of the library is in tens of gigabites.
Using the OneDrive sync client requires a download (and then upload) of a local copy of all content of the document library. This is not a good option as it requires puts demands on local resources such as bandwidth and computer. Also the sync does not move the version history, only the newest version. The sync takes a long time and sometimes nothing happens for a long time with the message "sync delays caused by service load". So basically not an option.
The "Move To" feature found in the library takes a very long time and worse, when selecting all folders at the top level of the library and selecting "Move To" it actually does not move everything. After 24hrs. of processing (this was not a very big library) some content was left behind in the old library. So basically not an option.
Using a 3rd party tool (assuming there is such a tool that can move content of very large document libraries between site collections) is not an option due to cost.
Any other options you can point out?
Regards,
Birgir
Recently I attempted to move around some files from the document library of my Team Site to a sub-site with some unique permissions (which is our goal, to create a better secured document structure). While the "copy to" option works fine (yea, takes longer than I expected), but the "move to" option moved the files to the recycle bin of the Team Site, and I had to spend a whole day retrieving all those files. I am confused now, it is supposed to happen? How does this work?
Thanks,
Suparna
