This article is about Box Shuttle in the Admin Console. If you’re using legacy Box Shuttle, a standalone tool, see legacy migration guides.

Migrating content to Box is an important step in your digital transformation journey. With Box Shuttle, it's easier than ever to achieve. Box Shuttle brings petabyte-scale content migration to the Box admin console. A self-service migration tool for Box customers, Box Shuttle helps organizations migrate their content into Box - from more than 10 different source tools.

Box Shuttle can be used by admins and by co-admins with content manager access. When Box Shuttle accesses data, it does so with admin privileges. This means that co-admins can run analysis, run migration jobs, and browse - but not open or download - content in the tenant account.

Box Shuttle's content migration technology provides powerful tools to help organizations execute content migrations off of more than 10 different source systems, including on-premises servers, EFSS tools, SharePoint deployments, and cloud storage tools.

Source data analysis

Box Shuttle allows organizations to analyze existing source data to define the full scale of their content migration requirements. With Box Shuttle, organizations can get a deep understanding of the data that lives on their source systems, building a blueprint of all of the content they are looking to migrate – which allows organizations to build a robust migration approach and identify then modify potential errors. Box Shuttle analysis capabilities help organizations understand:

Content volume: Identify the volume of content on a given source, including total files and total folders. Segment volume by files per owner, file size per owner, files per extension, total files per extension, files per category and file size per category.
Content activity: Understand file creation date, last modified date, and, on file servers, last access date.
Content-level details: Identify files that are password protected or have errors. On file systems, identify Microsoft files that have links. In some systems, understand which files have external collaboration.

Analysis reports are fully downloadable, allowing organizations to get quite granular in content analysis.

Customized migration job configuration

Once organizations have an understanding of their source data, Box Shuttle allows full customization of migration jobs. Job setup includes the power to make decisions around:

Access permissions: Because Box Shuttle understands both the source system as well as Box, it can identify permissions mapping errors and provide a decision on how to manage these conflicts. Box Shuttle tooling provides users with automated resolutions to permissions conflicts.
Errors: Errors that were identified during permissions scan can be skipped or re-assessed during job setup.
Content ownership: Customize the mapping of source system accounts to specific target accounts on Box, and map user and group collaborators on your source to their counterparts on Box, including the ability to reassign content to new users if required.

Content migration simulation

Simulate content migrations by doing a trial run of your migration without moving any live data. This step allows migration teams to validate their configuration and settings, understand the success rate of the file transfer, and build confidence in their migration approach before executing the move to Box.

Simulations provide migration teams with:

Estimated duration: Based on both migration size and network bandwidth, a simulation provides you with HH:MM:SS view of what to expect from your actual content migration. Durations are estimates and results in actual transfer sometimes differ from the estimates due to conditions present at transfer.
File and folder report: A view of the before-and-after of both number of files and number of folders, and a comparison of the before size and after size of your data.
File information: Successful file report that includes details on new file names, extensions, and owners.
Target path configuration: Simulations report out the target path for every item in your data set. You can reconfigure your job to reshape the path structure for any target paths that you want to change.

If simulations do not provide the results a migration team is looking for, teams are easily able to return to the job configuration step and make adjustments based on simulation data.

Content migration execution

Before deleting or removing any content from the source system, validate that the migration completed successfully and that all content is present in Box or backed up elsewhere.

You migrate content at any scale with automatic API and WAN optimization. Thanks to analysis and migration simulation, the actual migration run should be one of the easiest steps.

To reduce end user impact during the migration, Box strongly recommends that organizations execute migrations via a series of delta syncs – a series of migrations of initial data, followed by new and updated data. Box Shuttle knows what data has been migrated to Box, and can execute smaller, quicker delta syncs to migrate new data and also transfer any updated data.

Box Shuttle does not overwrite any updated data in Box. This means that if you migrate some data to Box and start working with it, and then run further syncs, Shuttle will recognize the content you updated in Box and do not overwrite it.

A delta sync strategy also allows organizations to identify and remediate errors such as folder path length, locked files, and un-provisioned accounts. A delta sync strategy allows for users to continue work in the source tool, and migration teams to perfect the new Box deployment – until the migration team is ready to make the cutover to Box. Content migration transfers come with a set of reports of your content migration, which are downloadable out of Box Shuttle for record keeping.

To prepare for migration, see the guidelines in Prepare for migration.
If you want to learn more about migrating your files and folders only, without any permission settings applied to them, refer to Data-only migration.
If you want to migrate your content along with the permission settings, refer to Data migration with permissions.

Reporting

Box Shuttle includes extensive reporting capabilities. Thanks to reports created after each analysis, simulation, and migration job you can get detailed information about job performance estimates, migrated or analyzed files and folders. For details, see Box Shuttle reports.