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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.
A question on the process of moving the files. I've read through this post about the amount of time it takes, and I agree... it seems to be quite long in some instances. However... I have another question... Because it is browser based, and I've initiated the move... what happens if I have to shutdown while it is in the process of moving. In my current case, I'm at 81% complete (it did really well up until then), but hasn't moved in a while... if I have to disconnect now... what happens?
Christopher ORPHAL I wondered exactly this. When I had to do the same, it seemed to have continued and completed even with a shutdown. The only issue I have had is when files are open (or Sharepoint thinks a file is open) and they get left behind. I’ve switched to a more labor-intensive process of moving smaller sub-folders, to make the cleanup of unmoved files more manageable.
My experience has been 50/50, half the time it stops and the other half it does move over even if the computer is shutdown. I tried to move 12 folders, each folder had 300 files, all under 1MB. I noticed when I kept refreshing, it was moving 1 file per second. 60 files per minute, 3600 in 60 mins via web browser. We have Office 365 E5, i'm assuming the sharepoint library is on microsofts end, so telling it to move from 1 sharepoint to another, I was hoping it would be fast.
I have a big project at the moment, we built a new sharepoint site and I am task to move all the folder/files from another sharepoint into the new one. Total storage used up is 300GB. Hundreds of folders, thousands of files.
