Most cloud migrations fail not just because of poor strategies but also because of avoidable human errors. Even minor pitfalls can cause IT teams to incur significant expenses and rework. In this article, we discuss seven common mistakes IT admins make during Dropbox to Google Drive migration.
Table of Contents
Mistake 1: Ignoring Pre-scan Assessment
Dropbox to Google Workspace migration requires meticulous planning and a comprehensive pre-migration analysis to ensure a seamless transition. Without a pre-migration audit, firms can face permission issues, access problems, security failures, etc.
By streamlining pre-migration analysis, your team can ensure proper preparation as you migrate from Dropbox to Google Drive. CloudFuze offers a user-friendly pre-migration screen to facilitate a complete understanding of your Google Workspace migration. These help organizations make informed decisions and ensure a successful migration journey.
Mistake 2: Ignoring Folder Depth and Structure Limits
Architectural differences between Dropbox and Google Drive is one of the most common causes of migration failures that IT admins do not anticipate until files start to miss out.
If you have deep Dropbox folder hierarchies with several sub-folders, project materials, and client directories, there are possibilities that their structures exceed Google’s limits. When you don’t use a proper transfer approach to handle nested folders automatically, the 21st nested folder fails to transfer.
To avoid this, use a migration tool such as CloudFuze Migrate which migrates your nested folders beyond the 20th level by creating a link with “Long File Name” in the 20th folder, opening the 21st nested folder.
Mistake 3: Ignoring API Throttling Limits
Google Drive has a daily upload limit of 750 GB per user. When you ignore this during migration, it can cause unnecessary delays. Also, Shared Drives have a 400,000-item limit (files/folders).
If you have high-volume Dropbox data, segregate total users into several batches and transfer them during migration to lower API throttling risks. This approach helps you keep the workload in check and ensure that flow of API requests do not exceed them.
Mistake 4: Mishandling Permissions
When IT admins transfer from Dropbox without a proper permission mapping strategy, users can lose access to files and files can get exposed to unauthorized members. Similarly, file permissions are completely different in Google Drive from that of Dropbox and matching it while migrating files is a challenging task for IT admins.
To avoid this, check if your chosen tool migrates file permissions without any errors. Ensure to perform user mapping through an intelligent automation approach with flexible configuration. CloudFuze’s Auto-Map and CSV feature offers accurate file and permission transfer during your Dropbox migration to Google Drive.
Mistake 5: Forgetting to Handle Dropbox Paper Files
When migrating to Google Drive, admins fail to handle Dropbox Paper files. You need a pre-migration export step, or a third-party tool that does the conversion during the transfer. But migrating Dropbox paper to Google Drive is challenging since it is Dropbox’s only supported file format.
CloudFuze Migrate helps you migrate Dropbox Paper files to necessary word documents. After successful migration, you can access all your Dropbox files in the following format in Google Drive.
Mistake 6: Missing Incremental Changes
Many IT admins focus only on performing a successful one-time migration and miss out on performing delta migration. During your one-time migration, users would have been still using the accounts that were in phase of migration. To transfer those updates, it is necessary to perform delta migration.
Depending on the number of users in Dropbox and incremental changes, delta migration may take considerably less time than one-time migrations. CloudFuze Migrate helps you with unlimited delta incremental syncs while capturing only incremental changes.
Mistake 7: Missing to Check Migration Reports
After your one-time and delta migration, it is necessary to have a check on migration reports. Admins fail to analyze the data accuracy of migration through migration reports.
When exploring migration tools, it is necessary to check the cloud migration reporting dashboard features. With proper reporting, it becomes easy to monitor the migration process as well as streamline validation.
Businesses can check migration statuses, such as in-progress status, processed status, and completed status, of each migration job in the reporting dashboard of CloudFuze Migrate.
Best Practices for Migrating Data from Dropbox to Google Drive
Best practices for migrating Dropbox data to Google Drive:
- Perform a pre-migration analysis where you perform clean up, delete redundant data, and decide on total Dropbox data to transfer.
- Conduct a pilot migration of your chosen tool.
- Ensure correct user mapping before proceeding with migration.
- Follow necessary secure transfer protocols and migrate users in batches.
- Have a post-migration checklist for seamless user adoption.
Conclusion
Trusted platforms such as CloudFuze can help you with successful Dropbox to Google Drive migration. A successful Google Drive migration depends on proper planning and execution while maintaining folder structures, permissions, throttling, etc. in check.
Through the above discussed key points, IT admins can avoid mistakes during Dropbox migration to Google Drive.
