Forum Discussion
Urgent: Moved Folders Now Gone from SharePoint Online after Migration
I spent the entire weekend moving about 200Gb of data into SharePoint Online. We have thousands of files across many folders and each main folders has many, many subfolders, so we need to copy to SharePoint as folders.
I used the SharePoint Migration Tool and started with 1 Project Folder. We do not have 500Gb+ available local drive space (the migration tool copies the files locally before migrating to SQL) so I can only do 1 project folder at a time. Each Project Folder (Project 1, Project 2) all have the same subfolder structure with the same names (ie Subfolder 1, Subfolder 2, Subfolder 3 etc).
The Migration Tool only coipes the subfolders of the main folder you choose to migrate so after migrating 1 Project folder, SharePoint's Doc Library shows Subfolder 1, Subfolder 2, Subfolder. 3. I MOVE these folders into a new Main folder called Project 1. Success and all subfolders and files are there in their new location.
I start another migration of Project 1 then repeat all of the same steps.
Today I noticed that ALL of my Project folders are empty and the only one that shows subfolders is the last project that I migrated and moved their subfolders and even the subfolders don't seem to be the correct ones.
3 Replies
It appears SharePoint only moves the first level folders between other folders. When I moved "Subfolder1" from root folder to Project 2, it shows that main Subfolder1 as being there. When I then move another folder with same name from the root (Subfolder 1) to Project 3, Project 2 gets its folders removed and EVERYTHING gets put into Project 3.
After moving 5 project folders on the weekend, all subfoldres of each of these projects are now all under the last project I moved folders into (project 5) and is impossible to distinguish where things should be.
What a mess.I just did a quick test of what I did over the weekend with smaller project folders and using the Drag and Drop. If I copy entire project folders, that all have the same subfolder structure, the data stays intact. I then created a new main folder and moved a subfolder from another project into and it moved fine. I then dragged and dropped subfolders into the document library then moved to another folder and the data remained intact, basically replicating exactly what I did on the weekend.
The only differences is I used the Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool 2.1 to migrate the Project folder versus manual drag and drop and the folder sizes being much smaller (200mb versus 25+Gb).The reason I do not use the Drag and Drop is
1) This way doesn't copy all files and gives errors but does not give a list of all the errors, and only a small window shows the errors, but it doesn't tell you which subfolder the file failed on etc etc. I've copied one main Project folder using the drag and drop and it would yield about 20 errors and doing the exact same folder using migration tool copies them all fine.
2) Migration tool maintains folder and file properties such as owner and last modified. Drag and drop gets all copied as new.
3) Migration tool can be setup with multiple tasks ie I can add multiple folders, sites and doc libraries and it'll just run.
The reason we must use folders for these existing files is because of the shear amount of files and subfolders that already exist.
The files needed to migrate has 127 main folders (Projects). I checked a random Project properties and it contains 27,120 files and 3,253 folders. We cannot move to a content type solution and even a regular list won't work with that many files. We have to keep the folder structure.
