Tips for R-drive Migration with SharePoint Migration Tool

This guide is to help you plan a process for moving your network drive content to MS365 cloud storage. We recommend that R-drive content be moved to either Microsoft Teams FILES OR to a SharePoint Online site.

• For smaller migrations, you can copy files simply by drag and drop from the network drive to the MS365 cloud storage location. This works reasonably well for simple and small file moves.

• For larger migrations OR when there is a need to retain file metadata such as last edited and last modified information, the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) should be used.

• Manual moves (i.e. without the SPMT tool) will not preserve your metadata, such as “Date Modified”

SharePoint Migration Tool

Microsoft provides the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) for moving files from local drives, network drives, or SharePoint 2016 sites.

• SPMT is for use on Nexus workstations only

• Information on using SPMT can be found here: Step 1 - Install the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) - Migrate to Microsoft 365

• The current version of SPMT can be downloaded here: Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool

• You must be a workstation Administrator to install this software on your workstation

  • To copy metadata and content, you must have Full-Control Permissions on both the Source and Destination locations. Metadata is written to system indexes.

• It is recommended to use a “wired” connection on the Nexus workstation

Clean-up content

The SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) does run a SCAN before migrating content. We recommend that you do this SCAN to catch the following errors:

• Path names length

• Invalid Filenames

• Files that are locked

• Files that are too big (SPMT supports files up to 250 GB)

• Find and remediate problematic files like:

  • leading or trailing space in file or folder name (rename without the space)

  • leading underscore in file or folder names (rename without hyphen)

  • search for and delete or rename (turn on view for Hidden Items in File Explorer first):

    • file:~"*~*.tmp" (starts with ~ and ends in .tmp, probably delete)

    • file:~"*~*.doc" (delete if 162 bytes)

    • file:~"*~*.docx" (delete if 162 bytes)

    • file:*.txt~"*~*" (probably delete if it ends in dot tilde)

    • file:.DS_Store

    • file:desktop.ini

    • file:Thumbs.db

    • file:~"*~*" (delete files starting with ~$, probably less than 200 bytes)

Migrating to private Channels in Teams

When migrating to Private channels in Teams, those channels will not show up if you indicate you are migrating to Teams. For Private channels, you need to indicate you are copying content to SharePoint and get the SharePoint link to the Teams Files location.

Verify Location of Private Channel

• When copying files using a SharePoint URL, it is easy to correctly specify the Files location in the Private channel and accidentally copy things to one level above the Documents folder for a channel. The SharePoint URL for the channel must specify the folder for the channel itself. (The SPMT often defaults to the root.) If something appears to be missing after a migration, go to the expected location in SharePoint and look one level higher up.

Migrating from shared drives

• When migrating the content from the network shares, give the users advanced notification about when the migration is scheduled.

• If possible

  • set the network shares to read-only so that the content will not be changing during migration.

  • schedule iterative copies to capture changes if needed.

• NOTE: if users are accessing and creating files during the migration they may create temp and/or lock-files that will cause an error, by skipping the file’s migration. (Your log file will provide details of the error.)

Workstation issues

• The SPMT mirrors files that are being migrated to the local hard disk and copies to Teams from there. That means that if you are migrating 500Gb from a network share to Teams, you need to ensure you have more than 500Gb free on C:

• For migrations that are larger than your workstation’s hard drive space, you can go into “View all settings”, under Advanced, you can specify a different “SharePoint Migration Tool working folder” to use a fast external drive.

• SPMT doesn't clean up after itself very well so you'll need to occasionally empty the following folders if you receive a message about lack of space.

  • C:\Users\YOURUSERID\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MigrationTool\uwaterloo.ca
    and

  • C:\Users\YOURUSERID\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MigrationToolStorage\uwaterloo.ca

Set Source to Read-only if possible

Once the migration is done, ensure the content that has migrated is set to read-only on the original location. This allows users to look at the original folders to confirm that everything has migrated.

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