Last Updated on December 5, 2021 by rudyooms

This blog will be about some limitations you can run into when you are migrating your files to SharePoint/teams and one drive.

In one of my older blogs, I explained why I really love OneDrive.

But simply migrating your legacy file shares by only selecting source and destination within the migration tool and starting the migration is not best practice. Why you might ask?

Here is a good example:

Your end-users may have the urge to sync their team sites to Onedrive. Within teams, you can simply just press the synchronize button to sync the team site to one drive.

But what are you going to do when your end users have created a  very deep folder structure with very long names?

They will not be able to open files in the OneDrive client larger than 259 characters. A simple method to check for files larger than 258 characters would be running this command.

Cmd /c dir /s /b |? {$_.length -gt 258}

By default Windows uses a path length limitation (MAX_PATH), you can’t create or open files larger than 259 characters. Changing the longpathsenabled to 1 will not help you!!!

Now we have seen a good example, why  1  on 1 migrating your on-premise folder structure to teams/SharePoint is not going to work.

You will need to transform your old on-premise folder structure to a new teams structure. Try not to use the general channel but create new channels (or private channels, when not everyone needs to have file access to that particular folder/channel in the team).

Every folder that needs to be migrated has to be checked. You really don’t want more than 300k files synced, if you are attached to some good performance

But what to do if you already migrated your data to SharePoint without transforming it to a less deep folder structure?

When you look at the file path, you will notice it also has the company name in it. So when you have configured a long company name, you will need to change it before you will sync the teams site to OneDrive.  I guess changing the username to only one letter is not preferred 🙂 ?

A way better new method is adding a shortcut to your OneDrive and giving it a proper name. (you will need to stop syncing the team site in onedrive first)

After you have stopped the sync it’s best practice to kill/close the OneDrive Client app first and remove that folder (to be sure you don’t end up with 2 of the same folders, from which one isn’t being updated anymore)

Now we made sure the old folder is removed, start the onedrive client and browse to the sharepoint site you want to create a shortcut from. Click on the icon like I am showing below to start creating the shortcut

After a minute or two, it all arrive in your own personally OneDrive folder. You can rename the shortcut to give it a better name.

As you will see below. Instead of adding the whole team to onedrive, only adding a particular subfolder will resolve the issue.

And that’s not the only benefit you will gain when using this option. When you are using onedrive on your mobile phone, you will notice the shortcut is also added to it.

It is a very clear view and you can make sure even when you are offline you can still access it. Isn’t that great?

Conclusion:

You will need to move and transform your data to SharePoint/teams and OneDrive if you want to move to a modern workplace and start collaborating.

Before the migration, please make sure you are beware there are a lot of limitations. The max 260 characters in the one drive client are definitely one of them. You don’t want to run away from the Limitations just accept them!