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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...
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.
We abandoned the "move" proces. With moving from one Sharepoint group to another (or from Onedrive to Sharepoint), it moves all history files, and it takes forever. Fastest way for us was to first sync all files on file explorer (always keep on this device option), copy them on new Sharepoint group, and then delete files from old location.
Goximus I'm not surprised. After this experience, I won't be using it again. We have a big restructure coming up and we'll do it another way. We *would* prefer to preserve metadata and version history but at the moment, it's unusable for a small number of files, let alone if we tried to move terabytes. Moving using the web interface isn't viable either as we have many folders to move - it needs to be scripted.
Don't fully trust one vendor as well so we backup our entire M365 stack using Veeam. That's good but incredibly slow because of the way Veeam has to interface with M365. So once again, a step backwards from good old Windows file servers.
The cloud is great but in some areas, like this, it's a step backwards. I don't know why traditional file locking couldn't be revisited esp. with pretty fast internet access these days.
- Although even if you sync the source and target folders then using something like robocopy you then get long periods of OneDrive "processing" or worse, just a spinning cog. They really need some more debugging/diagnostic functionality.
The biggest flaw does appear to have been fixed - whereby if you logged onto a computer that you'd not used for ages or restored a snapshot/computer image, the restored computer assumed it was the master and deleted any edits made after it was last turned on. Deleting updated, new and deleted files. Horrible!
