Watchpoints & best practices for file shares

Before you begin to migrate content from a file share, make sure you review the Google Workspace Migrate best practices. Then, familiarize yourself with the following file share points. 

 

Watchpoint	Best practice
Large single user migrations—A migration of 50,000 files or more to a single user’s Google Drive requires additional planning.	Use a sharding users list to spread the migration load among many user accounts. To determine the number of user accounts to add to the list, use the larger value of:  One account per 50,000 files that are being migrated to Drive 10 accounts per node We recommend you set up temporary Google Workspace users for your sharding users list. Then, delete the users after you complete the migration. For details, see Create a sharding users list.
Migration phases—Plan your migration phases carefully, taking into consideration the size and complexity of the data.	Plan to migrate fewer than 20 million files in one phase.
Internal content shared with users outside your organization—If users or groups outside your organization have a Google Account, you can add them to Drive files and folders and migrate those sharing permissions. External users, or groups without a Google Account, can automatically receive an email with a custom access link at migration time.	You might want to reduce the amount of time that external users have access to your shared files and folders. If so, migrate this content during the final incremental migration and: In your Google Admin console, turn on file sharing for people outside of your organization. For more details, go to Set Drive users' sharing permissions. In the settings template, turn on Allow email invitations. External users are sent an email invitation with a link to the shared content once it's migrated. For more details, go to Understand file share settings templates. Tip: Use the Permissions by Object report to identify externally shared objects before a migration. For more details, go to Understand file share reports.
Data migrated to shared drives	You can’t migrate content to a user's My Drive and shared drives in one migration. You must run these migrations separately. If you’re migrating to shared drives, you must use a shared drives settings template. Learn more about settings templates.
Migrating permissions to shared drives	Restricted permissions (where a child file or folder has fewer permissions than its parent) are not supported by shared drives. If the file or folder has restricted permissions on the source environment, the restricted permissions are not migrated.
Access level in Drive—If you're migrating content to Google Drive, the target user must have the correct access level before you start the migration.	Make sure that the target user specified in the mapping has the appropriate access level in Drive: If you're migrating data to an existing shared drive, the user needs to be a content manager or manager of the shared drive. If you're creating a new shared drive during the migration, the specified user is given the manager role. Learn more about Shared drives access levels. If you're migrating data to a folder in a user’s My Drive, the user must be an owner of the folder.
Running test migrations to Drive	If you delete items in the target Drive account following a test migration, make sure to empty the trash before rerunning the migration. Google Workspace Migrate tracks items by ID and resurrects items from the trash if you run a migration again.  Emptying the trash avoids this issue and allows you to run a fresh migration.

Next step

Now it's time to set up a file share connection. To get started, see Add or edit a file share connection.