Microsoft 365 FAQ

Article
03/16/2023

Important

Mover is now retired for all Admin led migrations. The ability to migrate from Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte has been fully integrated into Migration Manager. For full details see: Mover retirement timeline. Migration Manager does not support the migration of Amazon S3 or Azure blob storage.

All FastTrack-led migrations have transitioned to Migration Manager.

Tenant to tenant migration. Cross-tenant OneDrive migration is now available outside of Migration Manager. Learn more here: Cross-tenant OneDrive migration.

A cross tenant migration solution for SharePoint is currently being developed and in private preview. To learn more, see How to participate in the Cross-tenant SharePoint migration preview.

Data migrated by Mover

Mover only migrates data from:

An individual's online drive storage, such as OneDrive, MyDrive, etc.

Mover does not migrate e-mails, mailboxes, contacts, calendars, site layouts/collections/pages/lists, etc.

Unsupported files and characters

We automatically process file and folder names to ensure they're accepted by Microsoft 365:

Files larger than 15 GB aren't migrated.
Files with a size of 0 bytes (zero-byte files) aren't migrated.
The following characters in file or folder names are removed: " * : < > ? / \ |
Leading tildes (~) are removed.
Leading or trailing whitespace is removed.
Leading or trailing periods (.) are removed.
See Invalid file names and file types for all other limitations.

In some possible circumstances with older sites, any file or folder ending in _files could fail. If you experience these errors, contact Support.

Microsoft currently has no file type limitations, meaning you can upload data with any file extension. For more info, see Types of files that can't be added to a list or library

Character limits for files and folders

Filenames can have up to 256 characters.
Folder names may have up to 250 characters.
Total path length for folder and filename combinations can have up to 400 characters. For more info, see below.

What happens to long paths?

During a prescan, our app automatically detects and reports paths that are too long for OneDrive or SharePoint to accept. The current path length limit for Microsoft 365 is 400 characters. The path length is calculated when going in to Microsoft 365 and includes your tenant URL, user site, path, and any character encoding.

Example:

This path is 93 characters long despite Documents/Old Docs being only 18 characters:

https://example-my.sharepoint.com /personal /example_user /%2FDocuments%2FOld%20Docs

If a file exists that has a long path, our app skips it, and reports it in your log files.

To save time and headaches, before you migrate, you're encouraged to shorten any identified long paths.

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What metadata is preserved in migrations into Office 365?

Source Connector	Creation date	Created by user	File modified date	Last modified by (user)	Folder permissions	Notes
Amazon S3	Buckets: Yes Folders: No Files: Same as Modified date	No	*Read clarification note below	Yes	No	No
Azure Blob Storage	No	No	*Read clarification note below	No	No
Box (coadmin)	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	Yes	Box Notes are converted to Word documents.
Box (single user)	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	Yes	Box Notes are converted to Word documents.
Dropbox (single user)	No	No	*Read clarification note below	No	No	We have a feature request to get the timestamp and authorship information out of Dropbox.
Dropbox Business (admin)	No	No	*Read clarification note below	No	Yes	We have a feature request to get the timestamp and authorship information out of Dropbox.
Egnyte	No	Yes	*Read clarification note below	No	Yes
G Suite (Admin)	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	Yes
Google cloud storage	Buckets: Yes Folders: No Files: Same as modified date	No	*Read clarification note below	No	No
Google drive (Single user)	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	No
Office 365 (OneDrive/SharePoint admin)	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	Yes
OneDrive Consumer	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	No
OneDrive for Business (Single user)	Yes	Yes	*Read clarification note below	Yes	No

Important

Clarification regarding File modified date

Our tool sets the File modified date in Office 365 based on the time the file was updated in the storage provider's servers; not the metadata timestamp uploaded with the document from your local computer.

Each cloud provider may refer to the server modified timestamp slightly differently. For example, Box refers to the server modified timestamp as "Updated" in its UI and the user modified timestamp as "Modified". Check with your cloud provider to confirm how they refer to these fields.

Does the Mover app interact with the sync client in OneDrive for Business?

We don't interact with the sync client in OneDrive for Business. Before a migration, We recommend disabling it. If you use it during a migration, it tries to sync all the migrating data.

What happens to shared data?

Data shared with a user by another user appears in the Shared with me folder. Data owned by a user appears in the user's designated destination folder.

What about notifications?

To prevent users from being spammed, the Mover app silences notifications during the migration.

What happens to data shared to Microsoft 365 Groups?

Data shared to a Microsoft 365 Group doesn't appear in the Shared with me section. Microsoft also doesn't notify users that they're now a member of a Microsoft 365 Group.

Note

This is a limitation of Microsoft 365 Groups and cannot be changed on our end. The user must navigate to the appropriate group within either their Outlook Desktop Client, or by logging into their preferred email through outlook.office.com.

After the user has logged in:

Navigate to the left hand menu.
Scroll down the folder listings to Groups. a. If the available groups aren't visible, to open the group directory, select the small arrow beside the Groups listing.
Select the desired group. From here, the left-hand menu should change, enabling you to open and edit Files/Notes within the selected Microsoft 365 Group.

What SharePoint site formats are supported?

Both Modern and Classic sites are supported, and appear the same in our app.

What will my file paths look like in SharePoint?

During the migration setup (described later in this guide), you can edit the path(s) to specify where in SharePoint you would like your data to go. From the root level of SharePoint, you can go into Site Collections, and inside each Site Collection, directories for Site Contents and Subsites appear.

Site Contents takes you to document libraries (for example, the Documents section), whereas Subsites takes you to the Subsites of that site collection. Navigating Subsites takes you through the same dichotomy.

Most cloud storage providers, G Suite Drive for example, start the listing with a user such as /user@example.com/Marketing Folder. SharePoint doesn't do this, so you would be looking at a path such as /Marketing/Site Contents/Documents.

How does library permissions inheritance affect migration?

To set specific permissions on folders in a document library, inheritance must be disabled. Permissions inheritance is typically turned on by default, which makes all the data within the library subject to the permissions set on the library. This is similar behavior to team folders or team drives in other cloud services, whereby if users have access to the root level, they have access to everything contained within.

If inheritance isn't disabled at the root, any permissions we try to set on individual folders are overridden by the library access permissions.

To disable inheritance:

In the Library settings, visit Permissions for this document library:

Select Stop Inheriting Permissions. a. This enables you to select the permissions you would like to remove:
- Site members
- Site visitors
Select Remove User Permissions.

This prevents site members/visitors from inheriting permissions to all the data that we migrate into that library, allowing permissions to only those site members who we explicitly write to the folders themselves.

For more info, see SharePoint permissions inheritance.

Does Mover support Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams appears and operates the same as a SharePoint site.

What is the item limit for SharePoint?

Many sites claim that SharePoint has a 5,000-item limit. This isn't true. The SharePoint 5,000-item limit applies to how many items appear in a search list view: a maximum of 5,000.

SharePoint sites do have file size and number limits, which are covered in detail here: SharePoint limits.

Some list view options may prevent search list views with more than 5,000 items from appearing.

How are permissions handled?

Permissions are handled in different ways depending on the source/destination connectors used.

When migrating data from a Single User Connector, permissions won't be applied to any migrated data.
When migrating from a non-Microsoft Administrative connector (such as G Suite or Dropbox), apply permissions at the folder level with the child folders inheriting those permissions.
When migrating from one Office 365 tenant to another Office 365 tenant using Office 365 (OneDrive/SharePoint Admin), apply permissions at the file level.

How many user Transfer Rows can I run at once?

At a maximum, only 50 user Transfer Rows can run simultaneously. This total includes both scanning and migrating.

If you select more than that total combined number and start scanning or migrating, only 50 randomly chosen rows will run. The rest is in the "Queued Transfer Rows."

As a transfer row completes, another from the queue starts migrating or scanning automatically. While 50 concurrent user transfer rows are the maximum allowed, if a migration experiences any slowdowns or back-off requests, it may drop lower than this number to keep the migration stable.