How to Transfer Everything From Dropbox to OneDrive?

Businesses that need to transfer everything from Dropbox to OneDrive, be it user accounts, files and folders, chat messages, and more, must have a proper roadmap that focuses on strategic migration of all entities and data types.

Migrating everything over to OneDrive from Dropbox can seem complex, and it is to some extent true. However, that shouldn’t deter your IT team from creating a proper plan outlining every critical aspect of the migration. And to help you do that, we have shared several high-level insights in this post that your team can use to inform the overall migration strategy.

Migration of User Accounts

User accounts are undoubtedly the most important factor to prioritize when it comes to performing a comprehensive Dropbox to OneDrive for Business migration. The first fundamental step to get started is to assess the total number of user accounts present in your company’s Dropbox storage during the pre-migration analysis stage.

Perform the assessment in such a way that, your IT team is able to:

• Identify the total number of active user accounts
• Identify the total number of inactive accounts, such as archived accounts
• Identify the total number of demo user accounts

With such analysis, your IT team, together with other decision makers of the company, can decide the types and total number of user accounts to migrate. Once that is out of the way, the next critical step is to map the user accounts.

While our content migration tool, X-Change, offers the option of auto-mapping the user accounts, it is best to perform the mapping with the CSV method.

Download our User Mapping white paper to deep dive into the details of mapping user accounts using the auto-mapping and CSV mapping methods.

Migration of Files and Folders

It goes without saying that files and folders form an essential part of migrating everything from Dropbox to OneDrive. But with moving high-volume files and folders of multi-terabytes and petabytes come technical challenges that can raise the risk of downtime.

The best way to avoid making this process complicated is to transfer the files and folders in their original structure, i.e., nested structure. Our tool does an accurate job at preserving the folder hierarchy during Dropbox to OneDrive and other migrations.

Apart from the regular files, such as Microsoft and Google files, prioritize the migration of Dropbox Paper files to OneDrive.

Preservation of Metadata and Other Features

When planning the migration of files and folders from Dropbox, it is equally important to ensure that all the metadata is retained in OneDrive. Also, preserving these features in OneDrive can help maintain the existing user collaboration structure and overall operations continuity:

• Sharing permissions (between internal users)
• Sharing permissions (between internal users and external collaborators)
• File versions
• Embedded links

Migration of Chat Messages and Emails

If your company is using a third-party chat application with Dropbox, such as Slack, your IT team can consider migrating all the users, channels, and messages to Microsoft Teams as part of migrating everything over and consolidating into Microsoft 365.

Similarly, the email system your company is using alongside Dropbox can be migrated to Microsoft 365’s Outlook. Our Outlook migration tool can enable your business to securely and flawlessly migrate mailboxes, inboxes, sent items, attachments, calendar events and timestamps, and more.