1. BitTitan Help Center
  2. Perform a Migration
  3. Other Document Migration Types
  4. File Server Migrations
  5. File Server File Share Migrations

File Server File Shares to SharePoint Migration Guide

This is the complete onboarding task flow for migrating file shares from Windows File Servers to SharePoint Online document libraries. Due to versioning, storage usage in SharePoint may be increased when migrating with permissions.

If permissions are to be included in the migration, users must exist on Microsoft 365 and have Microsoft 365 licenses assigned to them.

You will need to create separate MigrationWiz projects for each file share. The reason for this is that each project will need to point at a different container and will need to potentially point to a different destination SharePoint site.

The following items will be migrated from the File Server to SharePoint:

  • Folder structure
  • Files
  • Permissions

First migration?

We’ve created a guide on scoping, planning, and managing the migration process for your use. If this is your first migration, we recommend reading this guide carefully.

MigrationWiz

MigrationWiz is a migration tool, not a syncing tool. If changes are made at the source after migration, they will not sync to the destination, nor will changes made at the destination sync to the source. We do not have “live” monitoring of changes (as with a sync agent) and we cannot handle scenarios such as conflict resolution without user interaction.

MigrationWiz supports the capability to share migration projects across a Workgroup. When the Project Sharing feature is turned on, all Agents besides those who are Inactive can view all migrations projects. 

We are not able to support migrations with two-factor or multifactor authentication. 

The maximum file size for migration through MigrationWiz varies by migration type and environment, but may never exceed 60GB.

Prerequisites

Licensing

We recommend that you purchase the Shared Documents 50GB/100GB license for this migration scenario.  The Shared Document license applies to any document migration projects involving SharePoint or Google Shared Drives. This license type migrates up to 50GB or 100 GB of data per license. Flex Collaboration licenses are good for up to 100 GB per license.

This license does not support BitTitan software such as DeploymentPro.

Purchase licenses Considerations

Purchase licenses by following the steps below.

  1. Sign in to your BitTitan account. 
  2. In the top navigation bar, click Purchase.
  3. Click the Select button and choose Shared Document 50GB License or Shared Document 100GB License licenses.
  4. Enter the number of licenses you want to purchase. Click Buy Now.
  5. Enter a Billing address if applicable.
  6. Click Next.
  7. Review the Order Summary and enter a payment method.
  8. Click Place Your Order.

Limitations

  • SharePoint and OneDrive for Business have a 400-character limit for file paths and names. Other document storage services, like Google Drive or Dropbox, might not enforce character limits.
    When migrating from one of those platforms to SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, you might need to shrink file paths and file names. Use the "ShrinkFoldersMaxLength=300" advanced option as described in the Advance Options portion of this migration guide. 
  • Migration of versions is NOT supported with this migration

Prepare the Azure Environment

  1. Estimate Azure storage costs. This step is optional but is useful in providing the customer with upfront storage costs ahead of time.  You will need enough storage capacity to upload all of the migrating data.
  2. Buy an Azure subscription, or use the free one-month trial ( this option is only viable if you are performing a very small migration).
  3. Create an Azure storage account. We recommend you create an Azure Storage Account in the same Microsoft data center as the Destination Microsoft 365 tenant. Unless specified, leave all settings as default.
    1. Visit ​https://portal.az​ure.com​  
    2. Click Storage accounts.​
    3. Click Storage Create.​
    4. Select the subscription in which you want to create the new storage account.
    5. Select your Resource group.​ Create a new one if one doesn't exist.
    6. Enter a name for your storage account.​
    7. Choose your Datacenter location.
    8. Choose Standard performance
    9. In the Redundancy field, select Locally Redundant Storage (LRS).
    10. Click Review.
    11. Click Create.
    12. Once the deployment shows as complete, click on Go to resource.
    13. Select Access keys under "Security + Networking".
    14. Copy the Storage account name and the key 1.  You will use this when running UploaderWiz and within the migration project.
    15. Click on Containers under "Data Storage"
    16. Create a container for each separate file server you will be uploading and make note of the name(s).

When uploading, MigrationWiz will create three metadata files, which will be added to each container. These are used during migration by MigrationWiz, to build the folder structure in OneDrive for Business and to migrate the permissions. They should not be deleted until after the migration.

Prepare the Destination Environment

Set up the permissions which will be used for the migration

  1. Ensure you are signed in as a Global Admin.
  2. Go to MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl and consent to the app access when prompted.
  3. Create a new Security Group named “MigrationWiz” on the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal.
  4. Add the service account being used for the migration project as a member of this security group.

You will also want to make sure that you create the desired destination site/subsite and document library within SharePoint

If migrating to a GCC High tenant, the above steps will not work.  Instead, use the following steps.

  1. Ensure that the service account has a license in Office 365.
  2. Give the account Site Collection Admin permissions on the SharePoint sites that you want to migrate to.
  3. Authorize the MigrationWiz-SharePoint-Delegated_GCCHigh app within the tenant.
  4. Within the project, add OneDriveProImportEnvironment=AzureUSGovernment to the support section of the project's Advanced Options.

Upload Files to Azure

Steps are performed from a file server, or a computer joined to the domain when logged in with the domain admin account, with local admin rights to the machine. This process utilizes UploaderWiz. Our guides contain information on running, configuring, and troubleshooting UploaderWiz. 

  1. Download and extract the UploaderWiz utility from here (e.g., extract into the c:\apps\uploaderwiz directory).
  2. (Optional, but recommended) Set the file shares to read-only access and inform the users that a migration is occurring and that their file shares are now read-only. This will prevent the user from adding files to these file shares during the migration.
  3. From the command console, running as administrator, from the directory that UploaderWiz was extracted into, run the following command (replace the x's with your own information):
    UploaderWiz -accesskey "xxxxxxxx" -secretkey "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" -container xxxxxx -type azureblobs -rootpath "xxxxxxxx". 
    • The AccessKey will be the name of the storage account
    • The SecretKey will be the access key for the storage account
    • The Container will be the name of the container you are uploading to
    • The RootPath will be the path to the files that you want to migrate 

    Important

    If you are performing these steps from a domain-joined computer, a network drive needs to be mapped from the domain-joined computer to the file server (e.g. x:\File Server).  If there are spaces in the path, then it needs to be enclosed within quotation marks.

MigrationWiz Steps

Create a Document Project

  1. Log in to MigrationWiz.
  2. Click the Go to My Projects button.
  3. Click the Create Project button.
  4. Select the Document project type. 
  5. Click Next Step.
  6. Enter a Project name and select a Customer.
  7. Click Next Step.
  8. Choose or create your endpoints, as described in the section below.
  9. Click on Save And Go To Summary.

Endpoints

Endpoints are created through MigrationWiz. If you select an existing endpoint from the dropdown, it will only show ten endpoints. If you have more than ten, you may need to search it.

Consider that endpoint search is case and character-specific. For example, Cust0mer will not show up if the search is customer. We recommend keeping a list of endpoints you have created and any unique spellings or capitalization you may have used.

You may either use existing endpoints or create new ones. 

Create your Endpoints

Please review the following tabs to create your destination and source endpoints.

Source Endpoint Destination Endpoint

Create your source endpoint by following the next steps:

  1. Click New.
  2. Enter endpoint name.
  3. For Endpoint Type select Azure File System.
  4. Enter the storage account name.
  5. Enter the Access Key.
  6. Click on Add.

Region of Destination Tenant

The Region of Destination Tenant feature optimizes the migration performance and speed by choosing the region closest to the destination tenant. MigrationWiz displays a dropdown that allows you to select the destination region when configuring your destination endpoint. 

Tip

You can find the region of your destination tenant directly in the Microsoft Entra admin center by going to Identity > Overview > Properties, and using the Country or region or the Data location.

Country or region.png

For more information on this topic, review this article. In case you need the multi-geo information you can refer to this article.

Warning

If you do not complete this field you will not be able to save your project and the “This field cannot be left blank.” error will appear.

Add Items

  1. Select Add/Quick Add
  2. Enter Shared Documents (or the name of the desired destination document library) as the Destination library name.  Note that you do not need to put in anything for the source.

Advanced Options

Support Tab

Under the Support section, enter the following Advanced Options, avoid spaces on either side of the "=" character, and consider that the advanced options are case-sensitive.

  • ShrinkFoldersMaxLength=200 This option shrinks file path names to prevent issues during the migration.  The option only applies if the path length exceeds the number entered.
  • RenameConflictingFiles=1 This prevents errors due to files with duplicate names
  • InitializationTimeout=8 This increases the maximum allowed timeout window for the enumeration phase of the migration.  This is most useful for larger migrations but does not negatively impact smaller ones.

Source/Destination tab

Under the Source section, update the Container Name to reflect the container that the items were uploaded to.

Run Verify Credentials

  1. Open the Project containing items to validate.
  2. Select the items you to validate.
  3. Click on the Start button in your dashboard.
  4. Select Verify Credentials from the drop-down list.

Once complete, the verification results will be shown in the Status section.​ 

Start Migration

  1. Select the users
  2. Click the Start button from the top
  3. Select Full Migration
  4. Click Start Migration

Run Retry Errors

Look through the user list and click any red "failed migration" errors. Review the information and act accordingly.

If problems persist, contact Support.

Post-Migration Steps

  1. Remove access to the Source file shares.
  2. Provide training on SharePoint Online.
  3. Decommission the file server. Perform this step only after migrating all data from the file server, such as home directories, when you are certain that you will not be returning to the file server.
  4. Delete all the Azure blob containers created during the upload to Azure.

    Important

    This will prevent incurring post-migration Azure costs for these containers. Be careful to only delete the containers created by UploaderWiz; these will be names that match the file shares and have a create date from the date of the upload.
Was this article helpful?
2 out of 2 found this helpful

Articles in this section