Migrate/Sync Shared drive to Onedrive

[Patrick]

Hi all,

 

We've been looking at setting up remote access in school lately and really all staff need is to be able to access a shared drive outside of school. I thought about syncing said drive into onedrive and then sharing this with the members of staff who need access. is there any pitfalls to this? Thinking of it as an alternative to VPN as we only need to be able to access a shared drive. Staff have windows 10 laptops so the will have Ondrive files on demand feature.

 

Thanks!

[thimon]

Hi @Patrick For shared areas I would recommend SharePoint Online over using OneDrive. OneDrive is more for individual files (with sharing and collaboration capabilities). You can sync SharePoint libraries via the OneDrive client in Windows 10.

[Patrick]

That's brilliant thanks, i'll look into that!

[thimon]

From the sounds of it you already have a shared drive, I'm guessing on an onsite file server. You can use the Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool to transfer that share up onto SharePoint. You would then use that share instead of your file server share, it's not a live sync.

[Patrick]

Ahh. Is it possible to keep the share on the file server and have a live sync?

[chaplic]

Short Answer: No

 

 

Long Answer: you could setup some sort of bodge, e.g have a user account run interactively on a server and sync the sharepoint content down to it. Then share out the area the files are synced to. Tools like Goodsync can do timed two-way syncs.

 

I wouldn't recommend. If you must maintain on prem but want some cloud benefits, look at Azure file sync.

 

 

I would setup a Team (even if you're not using teams yet) then use the sharepoint element of that. You can have it sync that shared folder via Group policy, and you get a new icon withe the share. Be aware it doesn't appear instantly on each machine (~8 hours from when the policy applies).

 

Edited November 28, 2019 by chaplic

[Patrick]

Brilliant, i'll look into that!