Strategies for Businesses To Move Google Drive Data to OneDrive

A solid strategy that includes all the action items plays a critical role in helping businesses move Google Drive data to OneDrive (or from any source to the destination cloud). And since business data migrations are comprehensive, it is important that the strategy addresses all the technical intricacies of the migration.

This strategy guide provides IT admins, IT managers, decision-makers, and business leaders with actionable tips for their company’s upcoming Google Drive to OneDrive migration.

1. Perform a Deep Pre-migration Assessment

A proper migration strategy (regardless of the migration combination) must prioritize pre-migration assessment. It is through a proper pre-migration analysis that it becomes possible for businesses to know what to migrate and what to skip.

For example, your company might not need to migrate the entire users and the data linked to them. A small percentage of the user accounts may not be useful anymore to your company and other end-users. In such cases, it is best to skip such user accounts to save time and money during the migration.

Some of the core action items for pre-migration assessment include:

• Segregating users/data to migrate from ones to be skipped
• Understanding whether auto-mapping or CVS mapping will be the best option
• Preparing the final user list to migrate
• Planning whether to delete or archive user accounts that will be skipped during the migration

2. Plan a Realistic Migration Timeline

The timeline is one of the most crucial aspects that guide the migration project and helps measure the progress of the data transfer process. And when planning a timeline, businesses must ensure that it:

• Sets the right expectations
• Covers all the tasks, including pre-migration analysis and delta migration
• Adheres to the completion deadline set by your company

You must plan the timeline to factor in the migration of each batch if your company has a lot of users and data to migrate.

Use our Microsoft 365 migration timeline planner to prepare a structured timeline to ensure your company migrates from Google Drive to OneDrive on time.

3. Migrate Features To Maintain and Improve User Productivity

Migrating features linked to the user data, including sharing permissions, timestamps, shared links, external shares, file versions, and embedded links, are critical to ensure that your company transfers data from Google Drive to OneDrive successfully.

Migrating user accounts and data along with these features helps maintain as well as improve user productivity in the destination cloud (OneDrive). For example, migrating sharing permissions and embedded links helps retain and improve the collaboration between users and their teams in the destination cloud.

4. Ensure Proper Conversion of Google Files in OneDrive

When migrating data from Google Drive to OneDrive, businesses must ensure that Google files, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides, are converted to the correct formats that OneDrive supports.

The table below shows how CloudFuze migrates and converts Google files from Google Drive to OneDrive:

5. Take Proper Approaches to Overcome OneDrive Limitations

OneDrive and SharePoint Online have several limitations that make it challenging for businesses to migrate data. For example, OneDrive does not support certain special characters in file and folder names. Other limitations include:

• Unavailability of certain file and folder names
• 400 characters limitation for decoded file paths

As part of strategizing the migration to be a seamless process, companies must choose approaches that help overcome the limitations in the most time-efficient and cost-effective way possible.

With CloudFuze, businesses can overcome these OneDrive limitations without manual intervention. Learn more about it from our business migration team.

6. Choose the Right Migration Environment

The migration environment plays a crucial role in determining the cost and security of the migration project. Businesses can choose to move Google Drive to OneDrive either in a cloud-based or an on-prem (local) environment.

While an on-prem environment ensures the best security, it is more complicated and expensive to set up than its counterpart. The cloud-based environment is well-suited for SMBs, while an on-prem environment is best for enterprises, government agencies, and financial, educational, and healthcare institutions.

Explore the differences between cloud-based and on-prem migration environments in deep detail in our guide: Cloud vs. On-prem Environment for Microsoft 365 Data Migration Tool

7. Validate Each Batch After the Migration

Validation is one of the most crucial aspects to determine the success of the migration. And the best way to validate each migration batch is to check the migration reports. Your IT team must make it a point to check the details of each migration report to keep track of the migration completion and its accuracy.

Some of the core parameters to check in migration reports include:

• The particular batch migrated
• The number of users and data size migrated
• The time is taken for the migration
• Status for files that have gone into a conflict
• Status for files that have conflict warning

8. Perform Delta Migration to Transfer the Incremental Changes

You must prioritize delta migration to transfer all the incremental changes, especially if your company has a lot of data to migrate from Google Drive to OneDrive. By transferring the incremental changes, you ensure that the data migrated to OneDrive is up to date.

Similar to one-time migration, validating the delta migration after completion is important.