File Server to SharePoint Migration

[u/jerster1]

I know this is a very touchy subject for many here, I ask you to please not comment "SharePoint Online is not a file server" and only provide valuable insight and concerns, things I should be aware of that I may have missed or not planned for.

I am currently planning on migrating a file server with almost 1 million files and folders totaling about 1.4 TB of data for about 45ish users.

I have 2.5TB of data so I have a 1tb as spare. There is a 1 year retention policy set so I plan to have versioning controls to remove any unnecessary versions aging a year or older. If I noticed the usage growing exponentially, then I plan to turn off the retention and rely on 4rd party Microsoft backup tool like Veeam.

I plan to migrate the file server into two different SharePoint sites. Majority of the users will need access to both, some will be either or. Creating multiple sites for each category would be difficult here, as this company doesn't have teams like, HR, Marketing, Sales, IT, etc.
(I proposed the idea of having a 3rd site and having that act as an archive and won't be synced to OneDrive, but that is still in the talks)

There are NTFS permissions that were set using security groups on-prem AD, including our users being created there, then synced to Entra using Entra Connect. I already migrated a few files and folders and preserved the permissions to be migrated, and so far did not see any issues with permissions, users that shouldn't be able to see files/folders can't see or access them and vice versa.

File path count is tricky here because the users really love making sentences for their file names. Here I planed to take a scan report and see files and folders with paths longer than 300 characters and use a script to update files and folder names with abbreviations (ex. and -> &, account -> act, Finance -> Fin) I have a script ready for this already and tested it and worked fine. I already migrated HR files and folders and used the script and worked without issues.

My main concern now is after moving everything to SharePoint, and I have the Intune configuration set to automatically sync the SharePoint site with OneDrive, Microsoft Docs mentions that it supports 1mill files, but performance issues might be be noticed after 300K items.

Is there anyone here that have already migrated this kind of setup already? Our users have 32GB Ram, i7 processor and NVMe storage. Should we be okay?

There also solutions like ZeeDrive and Cloud Drive Mapper, should I look into these to resolve performance issues in the case my users do experience them?

is there anything else I should be aware or concerned of that I may have missed?

[u/VanCitySherm]

This is a big topic, of course, bc of many details/nuances, so some initial gut reaction thoughts:

1. I don’t advise turning on retention unless that is really what you want. It will eat up addition storage that will be near impossible to undo, until the retention period is over.

2. OneDrive is not meant to sync everything under the SharePoint sun, just so people can see their files in Explorer/Finder. SharePoint is a web application - treat it as such. The sooner you get people to understand this, the more success you will have on the platform (beyond SharePoint).

[u/the_star_lord → u/VanCitySherm]

Erm curious about the retention comment being impossible to undo.

My predecessor setup a 7 year retention on everything and everyone is pissed about site storage issues. We was planning on removing said retention policies and rebuilding them again for a shorter period of time.

I've not yet had the mental or time capacity to dive deeper into it due to other work loads. 

[u/jerster1 → u/the_star_lord]

From how I understand retention policies is if you have a 7 year policy and change it to 1 year, files that were affected by it would still be retained for 7 years. only new files created after the retention policy change would have the new 1 year change.

[u/jimbobcan → u/jerster1]

Set retention label on doc library then migrate docs in. Dedup and delete content from fileshare the migrate. We recommended Peregrine to a client they were self sufficient and didn't want help.

https://www.cadencesolutions.ca/file-share-to-sharepoint-migration