The design studio's new client insisted on Microsoft Teams, so the studio bought Microsoft 365 — and suddenly their 200 GB of project files in Google Drive were on the wrong side of a fence. "Just move it over the weekend," said the founder. Famous last words.
Weekend attempt #1: download and re-upload
They started the big download on Friday evening. Google Drive zips large downloads in ~2 GB chunks; by Saturday morning there were 47 zip files, two of which had silently failed. Extracting them turned Google Docs into dead .gdoc pointer files, and the upload to OneDrive crawled at their office's 20 Mbps upstream. Sunday night status: 60% uploaded, folder structure mangled, nobody sure which 40% was missing.
Weekend attempt #2: the right way
A cloud-to-cloud transfer moves files server-to-server on datacenter bandwidth. Their computers stayed off:
- Connect both accounts to CloudSync — Google Drive as source, OneDrive as destination.
- Create a one-way sync rule, mode incremental, source = the projects folder, destination = an empty "From Google Drive" folder. (Incremental matters — see step 4.)
- Preview first. The dry-run shows exactly what will be copied — file count and total size — before anything moves. Their number: 183 GB, 41,000 files. Google-native files (Docs/Sheets) get exported to Office formats on the fly, which fixed the dead-pointer problem from attempt #1.
- Run it and walk away. Big folders take multiple runs — each run picks up where the last stopped, failures retry automatically, and the job report lists any file that couldn't move (they had 3: all shortcuts, safely ignored).
- The cutover trick: keep working in Google Drive during the week-long transition. Before switching for good, run the rule once more — incremental mode copies only what changed since the first pass. Nothing gets lost in the gap.
What to double-check on OneDrive
- Path length: OneDrive dislikes very deep paths (>400 chars). Flatten monster folder trees before migrating.
- Shared files: "Shared with me" items aren't yours — they don't export. Ask owners to move them into a shared folder you actually own first.
- Keep the bridge for a month: the studio left the sync rule active (weekly) during the transition, so stragglers kept flowing until everyone truly stopped using Drive.
Total hands-on time for attempt #2: about 25 minutes. The other 183 GB of work happened in a datacenter while everyone slept.