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Migrating to Dropbox for Business Concepts and Operations

  • Updated

NOTE: Please review the following guide produced by Dropbox Considerations for large-scale deployments of Dropbox Business

NOTE: We recommend you run an Environment Scan of your source platform before proceeding with a migration. The following article will give you more information about this feature.

The following article outlines the expected results when migrating to Dropbox

Migrate Dropbox

Migrating to a User

Click 'Add items to migrate' and select the item you would like to export.  Enter the name or email address in the 'Export Name'. In the ‘Import Name’ enter the username or email of the Dropbox user and select 'User' for the 'Import Type'. NOTE: Specify the user's email address if they do not have a domain email address associated with the domain entered under 'Destination Platform' > 'Account Details' > 'Domain'


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Migrating to a Team Folder

Click 'Add items to migrate' and select the item you would like to export.  Enter the name or email address in the 'Export Name'. In the ‘Import Name’ enter the name of the 'Team Folder' and select 'Shared Drive' for the 'Import Type'.


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Sharing of Files and Folders

Migrating to a User

  • Folder permissions will not be migrated from the source to Dropbox.
  • File permissions will be migrated as expected.

 

Migrating to a Team Folder

  • File and Folder permissions will be migrated as expected

 

File and Folder Validation

The following applies to all source platforms :

  • Files greater than 350GB can not be migrated due to limits in the Dropbox API
  • Folder names greater or equal to 255 characters will be truncated below 255 characters and created in Dropbox with ~0 appended to the folder name.
  • Incompatible characters with Windows are replaced with '_'
    • < (less than)
    • > (greater than)
    • : (colon)
    • " (double quote)
    • | (vertical bar or pipe)
    • ? (question mark)
    • * (asterisk)
    • . (period) or a space at the end of a file or folder name
  • Ignored files
    • desktop.ini
    • thumbs.db
    • .ds_store
    • icon\r
    • .dropbox
    • .dropbox.attr
  • Character literals are removed
  • Non-printable characters are replaced with '_'

 

Migrating from Google Drive/Shared Drives

Google Drive allows folders and files to have multiple parents and files and folders to have the same name as well as folder names to contain '/'. Below are examples of how CloudM Migrate will handle these cases.

 

File/Folder Multiple Parents

When migrating to Dropbox, any folders containing multiple parents will be migrated as a single path to the deepest path.

In the below example 'Google Drive' is the users Drive. Level 4 exists in two locations.

Google Drive/Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6
Google Drive/Level 4/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6

The above example would be migrated to Dropbox as :

/Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6

 

File/Folder with the same name

When migrating to Dropbox, any files or folders will be made unique by prepending '_' to file or folder.

In the below example 'Google Drive' is the users Drive. This user has three 'Level 1' folders in the Drive root.

Google Drive/Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6
Google Drive/Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6
Google Drive/Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6

The above example would be migrated to Dropbox as :

/Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6
/_Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6
/__Level 1/Level 2/Level 3/Level 4/Level 5/Level 6

 

Folder name containing '/'

Folder names containing '/' will be replaced with '-'. Example

Google Drive/2020/01/31/Folder 1/2020/01/01

The above example would be migrated to Dropbox as :

/2020-01-31/Folder 1/2020-01-01 

 

Migrating from Dropbox

Dropbox to Dropbox is currently not supported.

 

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