OneDrive Staff Migration

[TSEARS]

We are replacing all home drives with OneDrive which seems to be the common thing to do nowadays.

 

I'm trying to develop a smooth process so we don't have to wipe users' profiles from the machine so they lose all local settings etc. The process is currently as follows:

 

1. Turn off folder redirection GPO which directs folders to local path

2. Turn on KFM GPO so the Documents, Desktop and Picture folders are synced up to OneDrive, leaving videos and music local on the laptop.

 

The problem we have is that some users' home drives are pretty large (some over 100gb) and when we apply the folder redirection, this can take quite some time to move back to the local profile which at the beginning of a lesson isn't great!

 

Just wondering how everyone else went about this when trying to keep existing user profiles.

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited November 1, 2022 by TSEARS

[chris_uk]

I would suggest using the migration tool rather than letting onedrive migrate it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/introducing-the-sharepoint-migration-tool

[TSEARS]

Thank you - This was also one method I was thinking about. I was planning on using this, but it seems that when we turn off folder redirection GPO it creates a copy of the existing data in the local profile, so when we migrate data using the SharePoint migration tool and it syncs down to the user's profile, it creates a copy of each file.

So I'm going to investigate why when we turn off the folder redirection it creates a copy of all their files as we've unchecked the box to move data to the new location

[KK20]

how fast do you want to roll out? We did this over a full academic year. Process was:

 

1) inform staff of timescale and process.

2) map home drive to onedrive but dont migrate automatically

3) map additional drive letter to old home drive

4) limit quota to very small amount

5) let staff move their own stuff.

6) shut off the drive letter after academic year

7) switch drive letter back on for those staff who dont listen.

[TSEARS]

Thanks for the advice, this is how I wanted to transition to OneDrive as it limited the chance of something going wrong, but the feedback was that staff don't have time to go through their files and copy them to OneDrive....

So I've been doing some research and decided on the following:

1. Inform staff of a weekend where their data will be migrated so any new files created on that weekend won't be caught on the migration.

2. On the said weekend, migrate staff data using SharePoint Migration Tool.

3. Set User GPO to Redirect folders to %userprofile%\OneDrive\etc which will redirect Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Videos and Music.

 

I was initially going to use the built-in OneDrive KFM, but this is a computer policy and our users use multiple machines so we wanted to roll it out gradually. It also means that only Desktop, Pictures and Documents would be backed up, but Videos and Music would be local and as each member of staff does not use the same device this could cause issues with losing files in those local locations.