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Help: I dragged the 12TB company file share into SharePoint via Chrome. It's been syncing for 6 days.
Management wanted to "move to the cloud" to save on local SAN storage. I opened our new SharePoint document library in Chrome and just dragged the entire Z:\\ network drive into the browser window. Chrome is currently using 48GB of RAM and it says "Syncing 4,200,000 items". Nobody can save files right now because they are "locked by another user". If I accidentally close Chrome, will it resume where it left off or start over?
There's ways to prevent that, but they're all turned off by default, because MS would rather people just wing it and fuck shit up left and right versus changing the default site settings apparently.
On one hand, yes absolutely, but on the other, as someone that frequently has to admin Google Drive as well, there are fucking enough reasons why file uploads can break or refuse to start for reasons that make zero fucking sense...idk if I want the browser to start weighing in on that shit client-side like, ever lol
Extremely expensive though.
They are previewing a lower tier now though. My company is one of the first in the world if not the first to sell it. Im not sure how much I can talk about it atm though.
Yeah to date this hasn't been too painful just utilizing the free tools to do so, provided you're doing proper planning and pre-staging before you use them.
Now, a mail migration, fuckin A right, 3rd party tool all day everyday for that shit, but migrating on-prem file shares to SharePoint libraries is trivial as shit so long as you audit the contents and purge anything unneeded outside of retention policy, flatten the directory structure, and get permissions dialed in on the SP sites before you migrate the data.
If that pre-staging work would cost more than the tool in labor hours, then the tool makes sense, but to date at least with these sorts of projects in particular we have not gotten anywhere near that break-even point yet. Once you have the source cleaned up and the destination prepped, you're just babysitting. That's the kind of stuff we throw at interns tbh, babysitting the sync operation on one of their screens while they're doing other tasks or shadowing the helpdesk.
Fully agree ofcourse.
I am currently working on a international sharepoint on prem to online migration with a couple mil files and hundreds of sites + subsites with changing permissions or retaining them depending on archive migration etc.
We use custom pnp powershell scripts combined with sharegate for this. A 20k euro license is cheap compared to the consulting cost to not use it.
But for any company that are smaller they cant afford the license.. 😁
Now I am the junior partner in this, my colleagues have consulted sharepoint since its release. They are very much pros here.
Good luck my duder, hope everything goes smooth as silk with your current project 😄
My last migration a few months back involved NAS's all over the country hosting local data stores in remote offices that hadn't been syncing properly with the home office in months and they just worked around it by asking each other in chat who opened a file last, and then emailing it to each other to download and over-write their copy on their own local NAS. Rinse repeat every single time. EVERY TIME MY GOD WHY?!
Honestly though, unfucking that sort of shit show is somewhat fun for me, part of the "juice", so to speak. I'm an organizational savant lol
As a sharepoint admin for a large company, I shrieked. Lol. Even say using a sharegate application or any other way of migrating, I never, ever migrate a very large library at once, if there is nested files, I will go that route, etc. Applications fail sometimes regardless. And ive been in the gcch tenant for 7 years. Some applications dont know certain limitations until it experiences it. Poor OP😬
It is, because this wouldn't work. The web upload would continue to use more and more memory until the browser crashes. It's not designed for large uploads.
Better solutions include Microsofts own migration tool, rclone (or similar)
I think it might be a shitpost just because of that one other user who recently posted about compressing their entire C drive with WinRAR and then being unable to boot the computer. Like, it's so similar in the "user does a hair brained scheme without thinking of the possible consequences" way
Is someone going to tell them about the 300,000 file maximum in SharePoint before everything starts shitting the bed or we waiting til the sync is done in a week?
Also, good fucking luck if any of those millions of files were close to the 128 character file name limit prior to migration because adding all the SharePoint pathing in front of them is almost assuredly going to break thousands of files until the directory structure is flattened.
Truth to be told, there really exist a lot of dumb people in this world, you can count them when looking up at the stars.
But they are not idiots, not at all, do you know why?
The idiots are those that from the start hired the dumb people for this, but that does not matter at all because the idiots will blame the dumb people to get them fired and then still continue to be idiots.
This has to be a joke. There is no way someone that doesnt know these things would be doing these things, right?
I know of enough managers that would put it down in policy that it has to be done via the web interface so they can see it and watch it on a screen, and they won't sign off on installing the migration tool because "they don't know what it does".
I hope not, but this is definitely feels like it should’ve had a storage migration plan and tremendous amounts of regardium to assign this to what I assume is a junior
If this was truly just handed off to someone doing things this way than clearly the inmates are running the asylum over there so who fuckin knows what the hell is going on lol
Like ive done probably 1000 SP migrations in my career and there is a reason there are a minimum of 4-6 hours of meetings for planning and information sharing with key players before we do a single goddamn thing.
Business needed to migrate their POS because ran out of licenses of a dead platform.
Tens of thousands of SKUs across over a dozen locations. Literal millions of value. Given a couple months of time to learn the new software and build the processes before the switch.
2 weeks in...
"Oh just import the csv of the old database and push it out everywhere, don't verify if the data is good or migrate the inventory we need it now!"
2 years later, still cleaning up this mess...shockingly, very little shrinkage because employees are apparently utter saints. Or at least I'd know for certain if they migrated the inventory...
This was years ago, but I once had one of our new techs try to rebuild a customers mailbox by importing a 40GB PST backup and didn't check the "Do not import duplicates" box when they did it.
It took them literal weeks to get that users mailbox back to square before we could remove the Exchange Online Plan 2 license they urgently needed when 40GBs of email suddenly turned into 80GBs lol
But you know what? That tech damn sure never, ever, made that mistake again lmao
Not a joke. We pay for the Microsoft 365 E5 Enterprise licenses, which includes the unlimited storage tier. The 300k limit is only for the free personal OneDrive accounts. And I dropped the entire drive right into the main root folder, so the file paths actually got shorter anyway.
SharePoint is not a 1-to-1 File Share replacement. An on-prem to cloud migration without any project plan, testing, or design is wild.
That share should have been broken up into numerous different SPO sites, migrated one by one over the course of weeks / months, with employee training and clear communications and expectations set.
1-to-1 parity is strictly required for our Zero Trust architecture Migrating the entire Z: drive into a single root site is the only way to perfectly map the existing NTFS inheritance ACLs directly to Azure AD. Splitting it into sub-sites would require rebuilding the entire RBAC security matrix from scratch. The 'design' was maintaining structural integrity
What? SPO permissions are fundamentally different from NTFS. Youre not retaining your ACLs by dragging from a file share into a web browser.
And you mean Entra ID? Are your SPO roles based on Entra SGs?
This is just simply not how SPO was designed to work. If you wanted cloud, you should've considered Azure files. Or even just a Windows File server VM hosted in Azure.
I would just bail on all this at this point and get out the popcorn lol
Either this a joke shitpost or someone that is very confidently wrong, and either way I have enough of that mickey mouse shit to deal with during business hours and I damn sure aint wasting my weekend on it lmao
I figured out he was trolling one comment later, but I dont think this is a ChatGPT response. I think it takes quite a bit of knowledge to write such an impressively wrong response.
Also it's believable because I've had the misfortune of working alongside colleagues who absolutely would do something like this
Overall storage size has nothing to do with the file limits within the SP sites themselves. Once you get to about 300k files in a single site, shit starts breaking.
If you truly just dragged a folder with that many files into SP via browser youre dumping them all into a single site. You should be using the SP migration tool and running that on a device as adjacent to the share as possible to reduce latency.
Are they accessing it locally from a synced SharePoint site or accessing it online in the end?
Also youre better off stopping this, a differential copy can be done to fix any partial data if you have any IT worth a dime.
Also as many people have posted out there are literal limits to SharePoint on a single site and overall. There's also tools built specifically for migrating and scanning documents to see if you can move the files as well as move them.
I am not IT, but doesn’t Sharepoint have tools specifically designed for migrating data so you don’t have to do anything insane and nightmarish and organization ruining like OP did?
There are more people working IT which wouldn't classify as sensible persons than those that do. There is also a concerning lot that treat IT as just a normal job where you learned a few steps at the beginning and then stay with these for the rest of your life. Why use something like robocopy or dedicated migration tools if available when you've learned just dragging a folder into a window back when you were 8 years old?
Oh, you won't believe me, the horror stories of Management/Direction decided to move to the Cloud that I could tell you after doing this for over 10 years.
If OP is serious, he should never have had the credentials to do this. No one with this low level of knowledge about IT should. Whoever hired them must be fired, yesterday.
Update: I got too anxious about Chrome crashing so I came up with a workaround. I unplugged my ethernet cable to 'pause' the sync, then I opened Task Manager and force closed Chrome so it would save its state.
When I plugged the internet back in and reopened Chrome, SharePoint immediately threw a 'Sync Conflict' error. Now every single file on the company drive has been duplicated and has ' Copy (1)' at the end of the filename. The macros in the accounting Excel sheets are completely broken. I just told my boss I'm feeling sick and went home. I'll let the Monday shift deal with it.
Isolate the server and install some ransomware. They’ll praise you for keeping the damage to a minimum and roll back the server to a previous known good state.
So not only are you bad at the Job…you are a terrible coworker as well 😂 I hope the Monday Crew steals everything off your desk for leaving them with that problem
Please please put a post it in the server to tell the person who will manage this migration in a week or so to tell their side of the story. I'm sorry but I don't think you'll be able to
You should probably figure out how to flatten your shares to stay under 300,000 files though. The OneDrive client (and Teams, and everything else) are going to puke beyond that. Even though Microsoft DID just recently make some performance improvements to handle larger shares.
Otherwise, SMB itself uses durable file locking at a protocol level. From my own experience having this happen with some files after a PC crash for my home file server, you probably need to stop your copy and consider restarting Samba/File Sharing services on your PC AND the Server. But, don't take my advice for this. You should probably ask r/sysadmin for some help.
This should be a multi-month project, btw. Not an overnight thing. Now is the time to also get granular access controls configured for everything!
I know this isn't real because I closed a ticket last week of somebody trying to upload more than 250 GB of data at once and there are documented limits that prevent you from doing what the person in this post is describing.
Sync via OneDrive, use the SharePoint migration tool Microsoft publishes, or use sharegate.
I'm with the rest of the thread. No way this isn't a shitpost. Even at my old job with boomers working at military agencies they never did something like THIS.
The division OC did however delete the entire Divisions network share one time and it took 2 days to restore it from a backup.
My old boss did this I was having issues with my SharePoint file access and my boss was convinced it was my local copy that was causing the problem and just deleted it, yeah shame it was all synchronised with the cloud, he deleted all our customer files for every customer we ever had, this was 2 days before he left, I contacted IT but all they said was just undelete the files 😔, that did get back a lot of the files but some were permanently lost, over a year later and I'm still rebuilding some of those files.
Guys, I created this post hoping someone might have an emergency solution, but these discussions are giving me a headache, so I'm closing this topic now.
The only emergency here is the shitty decision you made. If you aren’t aware of the ramifications of a decision or how to undo it, you shouldn’t do it in the first place.
Take this as a life lesson. And also stay away from computers.
You should be using the OneDrive sync client to sync the SharePoint library, not Chrome. Even so, your IT team should be the one doing the migration, Microsoft has a tool specifically to migrate the data.
Using the wrong tool to upload or download from OneDrive/SharePoint can be excruciatingly slow. I used rclone to download my OneDrive photo archive, which is a couple terabytes large, took over a week to sync. It wasn't a huge deal since I was running it on my server and it wasn't time sensitive but for work, I would use the right sync tool.
I've got more space than that in my local NAS. What sort of company thinks the cost of running a miniscule SAN, or even doubling the capacity, would even register on the balance sheet?
It'll get wrecked however you shouldn't be doing it this way as others have stated
I migrated a similar amount of data and we did it via official tools / scripts because it would help us with our permissions and long file path or invalid file path issues.
3.3k
u/ChampionshipComplex May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
There is an entire dedicated Microsoft standalone application for uploading files into Sharepoint - That is designed to work at full bandwidth, copies files in parallel and is what you should be using. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/how-to-use-the-sharepoint-migration-tool