How to Overcome Limitations When You Migrate Box to Google Drive

As you migrate Box to Google Drive, you gain several advantages such as reduced IT costs, flexibility, efficiency, productivity, etc. In addition to these benefits, migration to Google Drive comes with certain limitations, and overcoming them is always important.

Here, in this article, we highlight the most common but important limitations that many businesses encounter when transferring from Box to Google Drive.

1. Data Transfer Rate Limit

When it comes to data transfers, Google Drive allows users to upload files up to 5TB in size, although there is a daily limit of 750GB per user. This means that transferring a 1.5TB file to Google Drive will require a minimum of two days.

It impacts migration times, particularly for organizations with large data transfers into My Drive and Shared Drives.

The file size and migration time can impact the Box to Google Drive migration performance. So, understanding the throttling limits of Google Drive is critical for estimating the migration project’s timeline.

By having a clear picture of technical upload restrictions, you can anticipate your migration timeline and avoid any hassles as you migrate to Google Drive.

2. Long Folder Path Limit

A folder in a shared drive can support up to 20 levels of nested folders. In contrast, Box doesn’t have any limit in creating the number of sub-folders. Therefore, migrating the sub-folders beyond the 20th level from your Box account to Google Drive is not possible. As your cloud migration partner, we can help you overcome this limitation with our tool’s built-in long folder path resolution function.

When there are more than 20 sub-folders in your Box account, our migration tool finds them and migrates by creating a link with the “Long File” name in the 20th nested folder.

3. Box Only Supported Files Migration

Google Drive supports different file formats to store them in it. In comparison, the source cloud Box supports Box Notes, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

You can easily move Google and Microsoft files from Box to Google Drive, as it supports them. But what about the Box Note that is only specific to the source cloud? The only option is choosing the right tool that supports migrating Box Note to Google Drive.

Our advanced migration tool has industry-leading capabilities to migrate all file types of Box to Google Drive, even exclusive file types like Box Notes.

4. Migrating Box Permission Levels

Each cloud storage service has its own set of permissions levels. Similarly, permission levels differ between Box, Google My Drive, and Shared Drives. As a result, it is challenging for IT admins to match permissions when copying files from Box to Google Drive.

Migrating permissions can be complex within Google Workspace environments. To ensure a seamless migration, it’s essential to connect using an Admin account with the appropriate permissions. In many cases, you may also need to configure a service account and delegate domain-wide authority to ensure security and access structures. If you’re unfamiliar with these steps, be sure to get clear guidance on delegating Google Workspace domain authority before proceeding with migration.

See below how the CloudFuze migration tool migrates the permission levels in Box to Google My Drive and Shared Drives.

Table 1: Mapping Box file-sharing permissions with My Drive permissions

Table 2: Mapping Box file-sharing permissions with Shared Drive permissions

5. Number of Files and Folders Storage Limit

Another limit from Google is that each Shared Drive can only hold 400,000 files and folders. Once you’ve reached this limit, the only method is to split the data across multiple shared drives. However, it can be challenging to understand your data and file structure to work through it, especially if you do not have the right tools.

This 400,000 folder storage restriction includes not just files and folders, but also shortcuts. Google recommends that you stay below this number for optimal performance. The good news is that Google Workspace offers flexibility: you can create additional shared drives within your enterprise. While Google does set some boundaries (like a maximum of 100 Groups and each Group being a member of up to 30,000 shared drives), these limits are so high that, in practice, organizations can manage even the largest migrations with proper planning.

Our migration platform enables you to run a pre-scan and gives you insights into your Box business data that helps you plan on splitting up your data before moving.

You can better understand how much data you must move by performing a pre-scan before starting your migration. To help you deal with any issues, pre-scan helps you identify potential hassles beforehand.

6. Metadata Loss

Box supports custom tags, comments, and file creation dates. These may not be moved to Google Drive on their own when you initiate a transfer. Hence, it is important to check and verify if you have proper retention of all your files along with necessary metadata in your Google Drive cloud.

Our enterprise-grade migration tool helps you seamlessly migrate Box files along with necessary file metadata such as timestamps, in-line comments, embedded links, versions, shared links etc.

Watch the video below to learn how our tool migrates from Box to Google Drive account:

Box to Google Drive Migration Case Study Overview

Intuit successfully transitioned from three different storages, Box, Dropbox, and NFS to Google Workspace (Google My Drive and Google Shared Drives). Our migration tool helped them seamlessly migrate 1250+ users and more than 70 TB of data to Google My Drive and Google Shared Drives.

We helped them overcome server overloading issues, Google Workspace limitations, and resolve duplications etc. To learn more about the case study, click here.

Overcome Limitations as You Migrate Box to Google Drive with CloudFuze

By tackling limitations using our Box to Google Drive migration tool, businesses can migrate Box to Google Drive with complete accuracy. With 12+ years of experience in cloud migration, we have empowered customers with end-to-end migration services and helped them achieve 100% success.

Connect with us for a free consultation for your migration, or request a quote today!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do I transfer Box files to Google Drive?

You can migrate to Google Drive from Box using CloudFuze’s advanced migration tool. Our enterprise-grade tool can help you seamlessly transfer high-volume data of Box storage along with metadata and permissions with zero downtime.

2. Is Google Drive as secure as a Box?

Strong security features, including two-factor authentication and encryption both in transit and at rest, are provided by Box and Google Drive. With its enterprise-grade security features, extensive access controls, and compliance solutions, Box is well-suited for regulated businesses. For people and organizations currently using Google Services, Google Drive is a safe and practical option because it integrates seamlessly with Google Workspace.

3. How to sync Google Drive with Box?

You can’t directly sync Google Drive with Box Cloud. But you can perform various levels of interaction and data transfer between the platforms:

1. Manual Method: You can download files from Google Drive. You have to upload to your Box account, then manually.
2. Google Takeout: You can use Google Takeout to export your Google Drive data. Then, upload it to Box for occasional backups or transfers.