Migrate from file servers and NAS appliances to Dropbox
Dropbox has come a long way in the cloud storage market from being a consumer based offering to evolving into a true business solution. Dropbox has built out a lot of features to truly make them a competitive product in the team collaboration space. One of the complexities of migrating into Dropbox is when it comes to migrating from your traditional file server or NAS into Dropbox.
When it comes to migrating into Dropbox from on-premise and traditional storage platforms there are multiple ways that you can pull your data, this stems from an installation agent, SFTP, SMB/CIFS, NFS or S3. For the remainder of this, we will look over the protocol methods and not so much the installation agent.
SFTP
This method should be your preferred over SMB/CIFS and NFS. Not only is it secure, as it transfers files through a secure SSH tunnel. But this protocol is faster, easier to setup and simpler to use. To migrate from a file server into Dropbox using SFTP, simply install an SFTP server agent onto your file server and configure a port forward/NAT to the server on your chosen SFTP port (22 by default). From there, you can map network shares and folders to Dropbox team drives and users for quick and simple migrations.
SMB/CIFS
The predominant means of transferring data on Windows networks, although you can migrate to Dropbox using this, it is recommend you avoid this. It is slow and does not error handle very well. Additionally, the base version is not secure and often requires critical infrastructure to be opened up on a firewall. Movebot does provide you the ability to run SMB/CIFS through an SSH tunnel for security, however the base protocol is still not ideal for large migrations.
NFS
Much like SMB/CIFS, NFS is the primary method for Linux based systems. One positive of NFS is that it performs better than SMB/CIFS. It requires less information to get going (server address, server path and the port to be accessed on) however is once again less secure and not recommended if SFTP is available.
S3
The S3 protocol was developed by Amazon for access to their object storage. S3 has become a widely supported protocol where storage solutions such as Wasabi, Azure, Google and many other storage providers support access via this protocol. Given the nature of the storage market, it is only time before NAS and other local file servers will support S3. When the time comes, S3 is a more robust, secure and the simplest way to access and transfer data.
One thing to keep in mind when migrating from local storage platforms is your uplink, as this is often the bottleneck when transitioning from the legacy to the new cloud era. Movebot can stand up worker (compute) nodes local to your region to ensure maximum throughput is available as well data sovereignty is maintained.
When the time comes to migrate into Dropbox from traditional storage methods, be sure to reach out to the team at Movebot who are able to work with you to configure your migration and stand up dedicated resources if firewall whitelisting is required.
For any help or assistance, or for more information on cloud data migrations please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Movebot humans, or visit our website and knowledge base.
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Originally published at https://www.movebot.io.
