Back in October 2019, Microsoft acquired mover.io, a cloud file migration company focusing on migrating content from other cloud sources (Dropbox, Box, Google, …) into the Microsoft cloud (Office 365, Azure). And while I was strongly involved in a lot of migrations over the past few years, I decided not to check this out in detail as I was working with too many other things (Teams/OneDrive adoption, PowerApps, …).
But yesterday, I saw the following Tweet by Elio Struyf, and immediately had to think of my own Dropbox account which I wanted to migrate into OneDrive at some point.
In the evening, I briefly checked my Dropbox contents, as I wanted to see how much data I should clean up before a migration (rule #1 of migrations: always do a cleanup of the source, don’t migrate things you don’t need). Luckily, there was not much to remove, and I straight away moved ahead with the migration. What follows in here are lots of screenshots I took along to way to show how easy the whole process was.
I started by logging in to the SharePoint admin center, and navigating to Migration and Cloud content migrations.
Clicking on Get started brought me to the mover.io website – however, I didn’t have an account yet. So I created one (no screenshots for this), and was subsequently greeted by the following screen:
Easy enough, I need to select a source (for me, Dropbox) and a destination (my OneDrive account in Office 365), and create authorised connections for both. For the Source, there are a range of Connectors available, and I selected Dropbox (Single User)
I gave the connection a name, and clicked on Authorise
And not really surprisingly, Dropbox asked me if I want to confirm that Mover can access my content – which I allowed.
Next, same thing for the destination, where I chose OneDrive for Business
I gave this connection a name as well and proceeded to click on Authorize
I had to grant Mover access to my OneDrive as well
Once this was done, I was able to see the content in both source and destination. I didn’t select anything in the source (as I wanted to migrate everything), but created a new folder in OneDrive (aptly named ‘Dropbox’) which I planned to migrate into (and at some point in the future do a proper merge of the DropBox folders with my OneDrive folders)
That’s already nearly all I had to do – the last thing to be done was to click on Start Copy.
The migration started, and I was greeted with the following dashboard, showing me how many migrations are currently running (well, only one), how many files and how much data have been migrated so far.
After a while, once some data was migrated, I clicked on my migration at the bottom and saw the following summary dialog. Of course I wanted to see more and clicked on Log
The log shows in more detail what has been migrated when, and if it succeeded or failed – something that I planned to review after the migration.
I started the migration in my evening (7.44pm), and it completed sometime after 10am the next day. Summary screen looked good with only 5 issues
Going back into the log, I filtered by Failures, and was glad to see that the failed items aren’t really important and could be copied over manually.
That’s it – 14.5 hours of migration of 36,702 files (20.2GB), a few minutes of setting it up, and another minute to verify the results – my Dropbox content is now in OneDrive.
While this may not be a very indicative result for a large scale enterprise migration, it certainly shows the power of Mover in smaller and simpler migrations.
Photo by Jordan Harrison on Unsplash