Google Drive migrations are straightforward and simple in contrast to migrating into the likes of SharePoint. Although there are a couple things to consider prior to migrating a single file. We will briefly cover six key items to keep in mind prior to migrating into Google Drive, whether you have 5 users or 100,000 or 500GB or 300TB, these five items apply.
Before migrating your organisation and its content into Google Drive you need to consider the following:
- Migration timeframe.
- Amount of files you are hoping to migrate into a Shared Drive.
- Total amount of data to migrate
- Infrastructure requirements
- Security requirements, such as data sovereignty.
- How adept your migration tool is at error handling and providing information, including audits and logs.
Migration timeframe
This is a big point when migrating into Google Drive. Google limits each user to a daily upload limit of 750GB. If you are looking to migrate over this amount you need to take into account how much data you have and how fast do you require it to be migrated to meet your timeframe. You also have to ensure you have provided yourself enough time to run delta syncs prior to going live with your new cloud storage. Movebot’s best practices are to migrate in phases or waves, you first migrate a proof of concept, check the data, migrate the remainder of the data, finally run delta migrations until “go live”.
Movebot can bypass this daily upload limit by load-balancing across multiple users. It doesn’t matter if you require 1TB or 20TB migrated in a day, so long as you can provide an adequate amount of service users, Movebot will easily ensure you meet your timeline.
See here for more information on additional connectors.
Amount of files to migrate into a Shared Drive
This is the second and final real limitation with Google. Google has a hard and fast limit on the amount of files you can store in a Google Shared Drive. This limit is 400,000 files and folders (combined). Movebot often sees this with firms and the best recommendation is to break the migration up into a logical method, such as creating Shared Drives covering alphabetical or numerical ranges (A — D, E — H, etc.) and migrating the folders into their respective shared drive.
Movebot offers the ability to run a pre-migration discovery scan across your entire source or selective folders. Part of this provides a detailed breakdown on the data distribution (files, folders across users and drives) and alerting you to flagged issues should there be too many files. Movebot always recommends running a scan prior to running a migration and best of all, a scan is free regardless if you choose to migrate or not.
See here for more information on Movebot’s pre migration scan.
Total amount of data to migrate
This goes hand in hand with timeframe. But the limit of 750GB a data per user with Google can be a factor that slows your migration down phenomenally if you have a large amount of data. Take 40TBs for example, if you only used one service account to migrate that data it would take approximately 53 days. If you were to use five service accounts it would reduce the migration to 10 days.
We recommend adding as many accounts as possible to ensure the mass of the data can be migrated as fast as possible. This then provides you time to run delta’s and be ahead of the adoption curve and have more time to work on the transition and other elements of the migration.
Infrastructure
When choosing a data migration tool, you will need to take into account any infrastructure that you may need to provision, manage or software you may need to install. Most migration vendors requires you to install their software on your own cloud infrastructure. This introduces additional costs on top of licensing fees such as compute, data transfer and engineering costs. Not to mention this also becomes an area that a lot of time can be wasted.
With Movebot there is no requirement to host infrastructure, install software or run Movebot’s software on your own servers. Movebot is fully cloud hosted, scalable and fast. Due to the way it is built, it scales to meet your demand and migrate your data as securely and as fast as possible. With the tool, your pricing is what it is and there are no hidden costs. It’s a flat per GB fee and is often 4x more cost-effective than its competitors.
Security requirements
Business and user data is a highly sensitive and critical part of a business in this information age. Data is the new currency and when migrating your data from one platform to another knowing that it is secure from point A to point B, but also its conforming to your security policies and data sovereignty requirements.
Movebot ensures your data is secure at all times both pre and post migration. Movebot migrates your data using HTTPS encryption or an SSH tunnel depending on the means you are migrating. Additionally, Movebot runs each individual migration job or task on its own compute node that was established specifically for the job. On completion the compute node is torn down and destroyed never to see the light of day. This infrastructure process enables not only a secure method to migrate but also a performant as there are no shared resource.
An additional benefit to Movebot being cloud scalable and native, is the ability to migrate from anywhere in the world and maintain data sovereignty. When configuring your migration, you can choose which geographical region your migration will run from and thus ensure data is only processed in the region that meets your security policies. If Movebot does not support a region that meets your requirements then please contact the team and they will see how they can help.
Error handling, logs, audits and transparency
As discussed with security, data is critical and important. Part of migrating data is knowing what has happened at all times during the migration. Before moving a file, during the transfer process and post process you need to know if the file made across. If the file didn’t why not, can the tool resolve it and if so how hard is it to re-run the failure and if it can’t be resolved what you can do to continue moving forward.
Movebot is a fully transparent tool that provides real time tailed server logs right through to easy to identify errors, information about Movebot has done to resolve the issue and a page of logs available to download post-migration. Before you even migrate you can get a full breakdown of what will happen right down to the file level (what directory path the file will go into). Post migration, should any files not make it across , it is as easy as rerunning the failed files. As well, there are full audit logs, failure logs, and downloadable logs from the servers themselves.
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Originally published at https://www.movebot.io.
