Challenges to Migrate Data from Dropbox to Google Drive

Migrating from Dropbox to Google Drive involves challenges like mapping users, transferring file permissions, handling Dropbox-exclusive files like Dropbox Paper, and ensuring data security and integrity throughout the process.

It goes without saying that the right tools and support can make the migration from Dropbox to Google Drive seamless and worry-free for IT admins and managers.

Let’s look at the nine biggest challenges businesses face when moving files from Dropbox to Google Drive and how CloudFuze’s migration solution can help.

1. Mapping Different User Accounts Between the Clouds

Some employees might have left the organization whose data is critical and needs to be migrated and might have changed some of the email IDs in the destination cloud compared to the source cloud. Mapping the user accounts accurately in the source and destination clouds becomes essential at this stage and is a tedious and time-consuming task.

In such cases, the CloudFuze platform allows its customers an option to edit the user email in the destination cloud to the relevant ones, as shown below.

By default, the user accounts are mapped with their respective email IDs and can be modified/edited while initiating the migration based on the business objectives.

2. Migrating Dropbox Only Supported Files

Migrating cloud-specific files is one of the challenges businesses face when migrating data. For example, when transferring data from Dropbox to Google Drive, businesses must move Dropbox Paper from Dropbox to Google Drive, which Google Drive does not support.

As a result, a data migration tool that automatically converts the Dropbox Paper into a file format compatible with Google Drive can help you overcome this challenge.

CloudFuze, with its built-in advanced features, automatically migrates Dropbox Papers of both new and old versions of the Dropbox account as .docx documents in Google Drive.

3. Transferring All the Data Features

To maintain the same workflow and collaboration structure after migrating to Google Drive, you must ensure that permissions, comments, versions, timestamps, embedded links, shared links, and external shares are all migrated along with the data.

But not all the tools support migrating all the features from Dropbox to Google Drive. So, IT admins must choose a data migration tool to successfully transfer all the data’s associated features to Google Drive.

Using CloudFuze, you can copy all the features with the data from Dropbox to Google Drive with just a click, as shown below.

4. Overcoming Google Drive Limitations

Google Drive has API rate limits that limit how much and quickly you can transfer data from Dropbox to Google Drive. So, businesses must know the limitations before transferring files from Dropbox to Google Drive.

CloudFuze being a Google Technology Partner, can help you overcome these limitations and ensures that your move from Dropbox to Google Drive is completed within the timeline and with no data loss.

Contact us to learn more about how we at CloudFuze can help overcome Google Drive’s limitations.

5. Ensuring Data Security and Compliance

Companies must use strong authentication and encryption to protect data being migrated from Dropbox to Google Drive. Also, companies should follow compliance regulations while migrating from Dropbox to Google Drive, depending on the country of operation.

CloudFuze authorizes cloud admin accounts using the OAuth protocol without needing to share the passwords with us. Furthermore, all sensitive data is protected with the RSA-2048 cryptographic encryption.

GDPR regulations, data residency, and many other US, UK, and European security requirements are all met by the CloudFuze platform.

6. Managing Real-Time Data Changes (Delta Migration)

As users continue to work on their files and folders (in Dropbox) during the one-time migration, incremental changes accumulate. Omitting those incremental changes puts businesses at risk of data inconsistency and missing important updates in the target environment.

Our migration tool has a delta migration feature that transfers those incremental changes post one-time migration. This approach ensures all enterprise data is always up to date in the destination without redoing the entire migration.

7. Migrating Dropbox Team Folders to Google Shared Drives

Dropbox Team Folders and Google Shared Drives manage ownership, permissions and structure differently. This makes migrating shared workspaces from one product to another complicated. Asymmetric folder hierarchy or access control can cause confusion and disrupt the collaboration experience after migration.

Our migration software supports mapping of team folders to Shared Drives to retain folder hierarchy and permissions and reorder them in the right way.

8. Dealing with External User Access and Shared Links

For businesses that work with external partners and vendors, it is important to maintain shared links and external permissions. If not properly migrated to Google Drive can result in loss of access for outside stakeholders.

At CloudFuze we resolve this challenge by migrating external sharing permissions while preserving internal and external shared links during migration for business organizations to have collaboration continuity upon transfer.

9. Zero Downtime and Workflow Disruption

Unorganized migration projects can introduce downtime, where users can’t access files. For large enterprises with hundreds or thousands of employees, even short periods of downtime can slow down business, frustrate employees and impact productivity across departments.

We provide zero downtime migration with our advanced tool and real-time monitoring. The automation features of our platform give IT departments full control to manage migrations without disrupting regular workflow.

FAQs

1. How to move Dropbox to Google Drive for businesses and what are the complexities?

It’s complex to move Dropbox to Google Drive for large businesses with a lot of data, many users, shared folders and need to maintain permissions, folder structure and metadata. Some of the common issues are file format compatibility, API limitation, user mismatches and data loss.

But for enterprises, these are easy to bypass by using an enterprise-grade migration tool like CloudFuze that allows automatic user mapping, permissions carry-over and all data migration features.

2. Can I migrate Dropbox Paper to Google Drive?

Yes, but since Google Drive doesn’t natively support Dropbox Paper, you’ll need CloudFuze to move Dropbox Paper as a .docx document that Google Drive supports.