1. BitTitan Help Center
  2. Perform a Migration
  3. Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint Migrations
  4. OneDrive for Business

OneDrive to OneDrive for Business (without Versions and Metadata) migration guide

This migration guide explains the process of migrating a OneDrive for a Business instance in O365 to another OneDrive for a Business instance in O365. The process in this guide does not support the migration of versions or metadata. The Source and Destination must be OneDrive for Business - not the personal OneDrive version. 

Review ALL steps and dropdown lists carefully and ensure all the prerequisites are met before beginning the migration.

For more information on OneDrive migrations, it is recommended to review our FAQ.

If you wish to perform this migration to include versions and metadata, use the OneDrive to OneDrive for Business (with Versions and Metadata) migration guide.

If you are performing a GCC High migration, use the following migration guide instead (This scenario does not support versions or metadata at this time), use the OneDrive for Business to OneDrive GCC High Migration Guide.

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. With this migration scenario, if changes are made at the source after migration, they will not sync to the destination with subsequent migration passes, 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. 

Prerequisites

Please consider meeting the following prerequisites before starting your migration process.

Licensing

We recommend that you purchase User Migration Bundle licenses for this migration scenario. User Migration Bundle licenses allow the performance of multiple migrations with a single license. For questions on licensing, visit MigrationWiz Licenses.

To use your license by following the next steps:

  1. Purchase Licenses.
  2. Create a Customer.
  3. Apply Licenses.
  4. Review Considerations.
Purchase Licenses Create a Customer Apply 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 User Migration Bundle 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

Consider the following limitations for this type of migration.

  • We are not able to support migrations with two-factor or multifactor authentication applied to the administrator accounts being used in the project. This does not apply to the user accounts being migrated.
  • App password usage, MFA/2FA, and ADFS are not supported for the migration admin account/service account being used by this endpoint.
  • On-Premise OneDrive for Business is not supported.
  • Note that OneDrive data may not be accessible for a few days after migration, due to OneDrive's crawling and indexing process. We suggest having your users log in immediately after migration but warn them that their data may not be available immediately. For this reason, it may be best to complete the migration on a Friday so the indexing can happen over the weekend.
  • If you are migrating to a Microsoft 365 Small Business Tenant account, the processes will be very similar. However, you will not be able to use admin credentials for your Destination endpoint and will instead be using end-user credentials. 
  • This endpoint does not support personal site provisioning for user OneDrives in the destination tenant. Microsoft has provided steps to perform site provisioning using PowerShell outlined in the following Microsoft doc. (These steps will need to be completed before any job is submitted to the MigrationWiz project): Pre-provision OneDrive for users in your organization.
  • Due to versioning that is created by default in the destination OneDrive when applying permissions, storage usage in OneDrive may be increased.
  • If migrating from GoDaddy, additional steps will need to be taken. See the following for a supplement of those steps: GoDaddy-Hosted Office 365 to Microsoft O365 Migration Guidance.

Migrated Items

Information about the types of items migrated with this scenario, can be found in the following tabs.

Which items are migrated?
Migrated Not Migrated
  • Folders
  • Shared Folders
  • Permissions (Granted by Direct Access only)
  • Code Files
  • Documents
  • Images
  • Forms
  • Executables
  • Videos
  • Audio Files
  • Original metadata and BitTitan migration metadata (author, editor, created time, modified time, name, file size, type, MigrationWizId, MigrationWizPermissionId)
  • Document attributes (Created by (person) and (time)
  • Modified by (person) and (time))
  • Versions & Metadata migrations only: Creation Date

Preparing the Source Environment

Please consider the following information when preparing your source environment.

  • Users being migrated need to be licensed to use OneDrive in the source tenant.
  • Users being migrated must not be blocked from signing into the source tenant.
  • Source OneDrives must not be set to read-only (This is initially for setup. Steps for setting up for read-only can be found under the Run Verify Credentials section later in the guide).

OneDrive Prerequisites

  • Create an admin account in Microsoft 365 for the migration, or use the global admin account for the tenant.
  • The easiest approach to follow is to use the global admin account. This was set up at the time of tenant creation. However, if you do not wish to use this global admin account during migration, then a new user account can be created instead. This will then need to be granted full access rights to each user.
  • The admin account must have a full license assigned to it, to provision OneDrive for Business profiles for each user during the migration process. 

Application Permissions for OneDrive

Continue configuring your destination environment by selecting one of these application permissions options and following the steps to enable permission levels at the destination.

App-Based Authentication Delegated Authentication

BitTitan uses app-based authentication for OneDrive, providing greater security and reducing the potential of Microsoft throttling. It replaces the previous Microsoft 365 authentication, which has been subject to increased throttling by Microsoft. This app-based authentication method is specific for Microsoft 365 tenants.

  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 Office 365 Admin Portal.
  4. Create a new user that is not having data migrated in the project. This account does not require any administrator roles to be assigned. If you already have an existing user, that should be fine. This user must have a SharePoint license applied.
  5. Add the new (or existing) user to the previously created security group as a Member. Adding it as an Owner does not work here.
  6. Create MigrationWiz project.
  7. When creating the source and destination endpoints, enter the user credentials in step 4 that correspond with the endpoint to which the user belongs.

  8. Add the support option UseApplicationPermission=1 to the advanced options of the MigrationWiz project under Support Options.

Export the Migrating User List to a CSV File

This can be used when bulk-adding users to your MigrationWiz project later. You can copy and paste the user list into the Source and Destination Email columns within your MigrationWiz project dashboard under Add > Bulk Add.

To export the user list:

  1. Go to the Microsoft 365 admin portal.
  2. Click Users.
  3. Click Active Users.
  4. Click Export.
  5. Click Continue.

Be sure to save the CSV somewhere you can access it for upload of users into the migration project

Preparing the Destination Environment

Please consider the following information when preparing your destination environment.

  • Users being migrated need to be licensed to use OneDrive in the destination tenant
  • Users being migrated must not be blocked from signing into the destination tenant
  • Destination OneDrives must not be set to read-only
  • Apply the administration permissions of your preference by meeting the OneDrive Prerequisites and considering the Application Permissions for OneDrive steps outlined in the section above.

Prepare Azure Environment for Destination Endpoint

An Azure Storage account is required when creating the destination endpoint for this project type (steps for setting up the endpoints are listed later in the guide)

Using Microsoft-provided Azure storage

If you are migrating more than approximately 5 GB per user in the project, we then recommend using your own Azure Azure storage for this migration. See Using your own Azure Storage below for steps to set up your own Azure Storage.

Using your own Azure storage

If you plan to use your own Azure storage, refer to the following steps to prepare your Azure environment. We recommend that you create your Azure storage account in the same Microsoft data center as the destination Office 365 tenant. You do not need to create any Azure containers for this migration.

  1. Estimate Azure storage costs. This step is optional but is useful to provide the customer with up-front storage costs ahead of time. 
  2. Buy an Azure subscription (or use the free one-month trial, and be aware that this option is only viable if you are performing a very small migration). 
  3. Create an Azure storage account. You will need to set up a STORAGE (General Purpose v2) account rather than a storage blob.
  4. Take note of the storage account name and the primary access key. (In Azure, from the storage screen, click Manage Access Keys at the bottom of the screen.) These need to be entered into the MigrationWiz migration project when specifying the destination settings. 

Create the Azure storage account

  1. Visit the Azure portal.
  2. Click New.
  3. Select Storage > Storage account.
  4. Enter a name for your storage account.
  5. Choose Resource manager for the Deployment model.
  6. Choose STORAGE (General Purpose v2)
  7. Record the storage account name (-accesskey, example: “accountname”) and primary access key (-secretkey, example: “W1RrDfkPNkfYfdVqizMNJjn5mXchwMP5uYBY8MsMqWTA7EubG911+4fZlki0Gag==”)
  8. In the Replication field, select Locally Redundant Storage (LRS).
  9. Select the subscription in which you want to create the new storage account.
  10. Specify a new resource group or select an existing resource group.
  11. Select the geographic location for your storage account.
  12. Click Create to create the storage account.

Now the storage account appears in the storage list.

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. (If no customer exists yet other than the Default customer. Click on New and create a customer for the project)
  7. Click Next Step.
  8. Select endpoints or follow the steps below to create new endpoints. 
  9. Click Save Project.

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, along with any unique spellings or capitalization you may have used.

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. Name the endpoint. It is recommended that the endpoint name is unique for the project.
  3. Under Endpoint Type, select OneDrive for Business from the dropdown menu.
  4. Choose one of the administrator login options:
    • Provide credentials, when selecting this option you must complete the Administrator Username and Password in the proper fields. 
    • Do not provide credentials.
  5. Click 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 to the Project

You can add the user accounts (also called "Line Items") that will be migrated into the project using the CSV file created in the Preparing the Source section, click "Add" in the menu dashboard and select "Bulk Add". 

  • If you're also running a Mailbox Project for the users that will be migrated here, you can use the "Add from MSPComplete" option. Verify the users are licensed in MSPComplete or in the Mailbox project before adding them.

Important

The user's Source and Destination address in the OneDrive project must match the current username (User Principal Name) for their account in the Microsoft 365 tenant or authentication errors may result. It may be necessary to edit the addresses in your MigrationWiz project after you have imported your users. This will be required if you have already applied the User Migration Bundle to an address that is not the User Principal Name. Read the Cannot Authenticate article for more information.

Advanced Options

Add the following Support Options by navigating to the Advanced Options of the project. Each Support Option includes the "=" character and is to be entered under the Support tab in the section named Support Options. To add additional blank fields for entering the Support Options, click on the "+" button. 

Support Tab

  • InitializationTimeout=8 This increases the initialization timeout window to eight hours. This is especially useful for large migrations.
  • DestPersonalSiteIsProvisioned=1 This option tells MigrationWiz that the destination OneDrives has been provisioned, as this migration scenario does not support MigrationWiz to provision OneDrives. This is mentioned near the beginning of the guide under OneDrive migrations.
  • Migrations of over 15GB are now supported, but this must be set up in Advanced Options. These settings will prevent timeout errors when a Speedster import takes more than 10 minutes to complete.
    • LargeFileMigrations=1
    • LargeFileMigrationsTimeout=7200000

      Important

      Values for LargeFileMigrations and LargeFileMigrationsTimeout are measured in milliseconds. The value of 720000 is an example.
  • Required for Multi-Geo migrations: For custom non-standard URLs being used for the SharePoint Admin center in O365, add OneDriveProExportAdminUrl=<non-standard URL> (Source tenant) and/or OneDriveProImportAdminUrl=<non-standard URL> (Destination tenant). Replace "<non-standard URL>" with your custom URL (do not include the ") being used for the SharePoint Admin center.
  • Permission mapping for files and folders: The two Advanced Options outlined below function independently of each other. However, they are complementary options that can be used together. We suggest using MapPermissionEmailByPairsInProject as your primary auto-mapping option and then adding UserMapping to take care of any outliers and avoid interruptions to your migration.
    • MapPermissionEmailByPairsInProject=1 When OneDrive is the destination, this option can be used to map permissions by pairs in the project. user@domain.com to firstinitial.lastname@domain.com.
      In scenarios where the prefix of the User Principle Names are to change during a migration, you will need to add the following for automapping of permissions based on the source and destination User Principle Names you have entered in the project. This option is only valid where OneDrive for Business is the destination.
      Important
      If you have user OneDrives migrating for the same customer in multiple projects, you must enter the following support option in each project instead of MapPermissionEmailByPairsInProject: MapPermissionEmailByPairsInCustomer=1
    • UserMapping="user1@source-domain.com->user5@destination-domain.com" Use the UserMapping advanced option when you want to customize the permission mapping for a user or group.
      Please note that the destination user/group (user5@destination-domain.com) must have been commissioned and be available at the destination document library before migration.

Filtering Tab

Please be aware that OneNote does not support versioning. To avoid creating duplicate content, it is crucial to migrate your OneNote files just once. Each subsequent migration attempt could result in new versions of your OneNote files being generated as separate new files.

To prevent this, we advise filtering out OneNote files during various stages of the migration process by adding one in the Advanced Options. Consider excluding OneNote files during the Trial Migration and Pre-Stage Migration. 

FilteringAO.png

We recommend you that only include them in the final Full Migration stage to ensure a smooth and efficient migration process. To ensure the successful migration of OneNote folders and files, particularly after initially excluding them, it is necessary to remove the one extension from the filtering tab in the Advanced Options.

Run Verify Credentials

  1. Open the Project containing the items you wish to validate.
  2. Select the items you wish to validate.
  3. Click on the Start button in your dashboard.
  4. Select Verify Credentials from the drop-down list.
  5. Once complete, the results of the verification will be shown in the Status section.

To lock (set to ReadOnly) the source OneDrive items prior to migration: 

  1. Make sure all OneDrive line items are not locked.
  2. Run Verify Credentials pass for all OneDrive line items. This will add the provided credentials as a site collection administrator for these items.
  3. You can now lock all the OneDrive line items.
  4. Run a full migration pass.

Notify Users

Send out the final notification that the migration is beginning. Include when the migration will start, the expected duration, any usage instructions during migration, and any expected steps or notifications for the post-migration timeline. Remind them to avoid modifying any documents at the Source, as this may cause corrupt data or an incomplete migration.

Run Migration

From the MigrationWiz interface: (Due to this migration type not supporting versions or metadata, the Pre-Stage pass is recommended)

Pre-Stage pass

  1. Select the users you wish to migrate.
  2. Click the Start button from the top.
  3. Select Pre-Stage Migration.
  4. Under the Migration Scheduling section, from the drop-down list, select 30, 60, or 90 days ago.
  5. Click Start Migration.

Perform a Full Migration

  1. Select the users.
  2. Click the Start button from the top.
  3. Select Full Migration from the drop-down list.
  4. Click Start Migration.

Addressing Project Errors

Look through the user list and click any red "failed migration" errors. Review the information and act accordingly.
If problems persist, contact us using the steps outlined in this link: Support.

Request Statistics

On the All Projects page in MigrationWiz, click the pie chart icon for the project you want to request a statistics report (far right-hand side of the page). An email containing all the project migration statistics will be sent to the BitTitan account for the project.

Project_Stats.png

Post Migration Steps

Remove the Authentication App

You can remove the Authentication App in Entra Center.

  1. Sign in to Microsoft Entra admin center.
  2. Select Microsoft Entra ID.
  3. Go to Identity > Applications > Enterprise applications, in the left bar of the window.
  4. In the Manage section, select All applications, look for the application permission you configured (MigrationWiz-SharePoint-Delegated or MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl), and select it.
  5. Go to Manage > Properties, and select Delete from the properties bar.

Click the bar chart icon in the MigrationWiz dashboard to receive an email containing all the project migration statistics. Read the How do I request statistics for my migration project? article for more information.

Decommission source accounts

To prevent users from inadvertently logging in and using their Source accounts, decommission their Source OneDrive for Business user accounts, or change their passwords.

Notify users

Notify users once the migration has been completed, if you set the MigrationWiz Advanced Option for Notifications, they will receive an email upon migration completion. Assist them with setting up access to their OneDrive for Business accounts and their synchronization settings.

Troubleshooting

Missing files or documents after a migration

In case your files or documents are missing after a migration use the IgnoreChangeToken Advanced Option to ensure successful migration during the second pass migration with the following value.

IgnoreChangeToken=1 

Keep in mind that to ensure the effectiveness of this approach, you should reset the line item of the previous migration before setting the IgnoreChangeToken=1 in the Advanced Options. 

Important

For any first-time or new migrations, setting the IgnoreChangeToken=1 in the Advanced Options is unnecessary.

Was this article helpful?
3 out of 10 found this helpful

Articles in this section