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Preparing your content for migration

Overview , Migration , Admin , Article , Established , Box Shuttle

 

Before moving content to Box, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure your content is ready.

Identify migration content

Start by considering all the teams that work with content. Take an inventory of all the source tools where that content resides today. You'll want to get a sense of how much content you have, specifically the volume of content (in gigabytes or terabytes) and the number of files if possible. Look for ways to label this content, for example: active vs. archival, personal vs. departmental, or internal vs. client-facing. This should be enough information to help you prioritize which content should move first.

These questions might help to determine your approach:

  • What is the specific goal of your Box program?
  • What upcoming deadlines impact your migration timeline?
  • How will you define success in this migration?

A few general tips:

  • Content vs. structured data: Box is a platform for sharing and collaborating on content and is not a good tool for backing up things like .PST files, databases or other blobs of structured data. Traditional backup systems are often better for those types of files.
  • Break your project down: When assessing all of the content that you have to migrate, consider breaking down the volume into several phases or projects. Your approach for active content may be different than for archival content, and different teams or departments may have different requirements.
  • Plan a timeline: Digital transformation never happens overnight, and the same can be said for a content migration project of any size. A timeline can be as simple as start and end dates on your calendar or as detailed as a Gantt chart with milestones.

Define migration requirements

Migrations are often about migrating associated business processes along with the content itself. That means that wherever the content lives today, there are people that have access to that content and those access permissions may need to be reapplied after the migration. Or perhaps there are third party applications that connect to the source content -- those integrations may need to be recreated or reconsidered.

Here are some requirements to consider:

  • Permissions: If there is one group of users that has access to everything in scope for migration, then recreating permissions will be fairly easy. However, if there are multiple groups with granular permissions at different levels of the folder structure, then more effort will go into applying permissions to migrated content.
  • Content archiving: For source systems that have been around for a while, existing content may be duplicated or obsolete. Consider using the migration as an opportunity to do some clean-up, create a Box folder structure for archival content, or potentially delete content to remove it from the migration scope altogether.
  • Content restructuring: Migrating content from legacy systems often means moving from a tool that has been used for a very long time. It's possible that the folder structure that was originally designed for this content is no longer the best way to organize it for the way people work today. Rather than bringing over a suboptimal folder structure, this may be a good time to reorganize the content to best enable work in Box.

Once you have identified the content and defined your requirements, you should have a sense of the level of effort for your migration. Review the different options for migrating content to Box. 

Large files

There are specific file size limitations depending on your account type. Understand the maximum file size you can upload to Box. Files that exceed this limit cannot be uploaded to Box. You may be able to get around this by compressing the file or by splitting it into several smaller files. However, this step must be completed before you attempt to migrate the file.

For details on large files and size limitations, see this topic.

Collaborations and email notification settings

It's a good practice to remove collaborators from the target files and folders before content migration. This action suppresses server-side processing including email notifications and event feeds making content processing efficient. You can add collaborators after the content migration is complete, or apply permissions in the final sync run of a job.

Scale considerations 

When migrating large amounts of content to Box, it's easy to bump up against the guidelines that keep Box performant and quick. These are recommendations to keep Box running at peak performance:

  • A single folder shouldn't contain more than 15,000 items. This doesn't include the contents of subfolders, just the number of immediate files or folders in a single folder.
  • A single job should not have more than 1,000,000 items.

If you have questions about these guidelines, get in touch with your account team to learn more.

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