Forum Discussion
Hillary Barter
Aug 27, 2018Copper Contributor
Moving or Copying Files: Painfully Slow, Loss of Data
Hello All! Our company transitioned over to SharePoint Online about a year ago. One of the largest complaints I have to date, is the time it takes to move or copy files. In cases of one or t...
- Aug 28, 2018
If you're using "Open in Explorer" I think that may be part of the issue, and I'm assuming that you're using Internet Explorer. From personal experience I never really got on with the piece of functionality. It worked well back in 2007 when I first used it, but now there are much better options available.
Option 1 - Move To
When you visit a document library in the modern experience, you can click on the ellipsis against the document and select move to (see attachment "Modern-MoveTo.docx". In Figure 1, you can see the option to move to, and then in Figure 2 you can see that you have a number of options to either move it to OneDrive for Business or to another SharePoint site. When I tested this with a document of approx 1mb it took about 5 seconds to get itself warmed up and then do the move.
Option 2 - OneDrive Sync
The alternative option which has been mentioned before is to use sync (see attachment Modern-Sync.docx). In Figure 1, you can see the ability to Sync your library to your local file system using the OneDrive Sync Client. By hitting the sync button, you'll see it connect to your sync client (Figure 2), and then it will be available from your Windows Explorer windows (Figure 3). Once it's been synced, you can copy and paste documents between synced libraries in the same way as you would with normal files. Again this took only a few seconds to copy, paste and sync between the libraries.
I hope this approaches are useful and that they work. If not, please let us know and we'll see what else we can come up with.
Rob Nicholson
Jun 26, 2022Brass Contributor
Shocking that this flaw is still present THREE years later. I've just moved just 750 files/161MB from a OneDrive folder to a Microsoft 365 group. The files have disappeared from the source OneDrive folder locally/in file explorer but they are still there in the document library in SharePoint. They have been uploaded to the new M365 group but OneDrive has been saying "moving shared items" for three hours now. So right now we're in real risk of people accessing/updating the left copy. It's now 11pm in UK. Hopefully it'll actually do the move by start of working day in UK.
I despair at the stability of OneDrive in business. It's a critical component in the M365 stack but it's simply not good enough. They need to poach the Google Drive team and ask them to rewrite it!
I despair at the stability of OneDrive in business. It's a critical component in the M365 stack but it's simply not good enough. They need to poach the Google Drive team and ask them to rewrite it!
KarlInOz
Jun 27, 2022Brass Contributor
Rob Nicholson I agree, onedrive for business has always been a half developed tool, pretty much useless for the task, full of promise but, typically, failing at the middle hurdles. I have observed over the past 8 years that M$ don't seem to have the technical expertise to fix it. Shame really but oh well there ya go!