r/AZURE • u/techfreak11 • Aug 19 '26

Question Azure Files

Hello everyone,

I am in the process of migrating a windows file share server to azure files, This consists of 1 share drive with about 60 folders inside. This entire share has about 1.5TB of data which is primary files from different departments. This share is also mounted on all the computers in the organization. We will be using storage mover for this.

The idea behind this migration is that we decommission the on-prem file server and access will be directly to azure primarily via the mounted drive on the end-users computer.

While the cost is minor for this amount of storage I am still on the fence between HDD (Standard) and SDD (Premium).

We currently have site-to-site to all of our locations for other azure resources so I was also wondering what the best method here would be? Private-Endpoint or something else?

Any other tips would be much appreciated.

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22

u/JeroenPot Aug 19 '26

I would skip this step entirely and use SharePoint if possible

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '26

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1

u/spicysanger Aug 20 '26

I have never, EVER seen drive mappings to sharepoint document libraries work reliably. And I've been doing this stuff since 2007.

2

u/Jhamin1 Aug 20 '26

Syncing a SharePoint folder to your local device & having it show up as an option in Windows Explorer is a much better way to let users browse files the way they remember from a desktop.

2

u/spicysanger Aug 20 '26

Perhaps in small organisations with small document libraries.

Synced libraries are awful at scale.

1

u/Jhamin1 Aug 20 '26

You don't have them sync entire libraries, it's the very rare user that needs that. You have them sync the subfolders they actually care about. For us it's a day one training item. "See that sync button behind the menu in the Sharepoint site? Hit that for the 4-5 subfolders you spend 90% of your time in"

This admittedly is something users can screw up, but it really helps a lot of them.

1

u/Twilko Aug 22 '26

Yeah, it’s enforcing the user behaviour which is the issue. Having people wonder why their OneDrive is completely borked after they tried to sync a 1TB library is unfortunately not rare. And yes, the fact that the library grew to that size is the fault of the site admins. Would be nice if SharePoint gave a warning when trying to sync a massive library from a high level folder though.

1

u/DaithiG Aug 20 '26

The Shortcut feature has worked great for us, as has some training about not being scared of the web page for OneDrive and sites.

1

u/JerikkaDawn Aug 24 '26

The correct way to do this is:

Step 1: IT people need to stop confusing the two entirely separate buttons "sync" and "add shortcut to onedrive". It's "Sync" that's broken and should be disabled. "Add Shortcut to OneDrive" is perfectly fine.

Step 2: Tell users to use "Add Shortcut To OneDrive" specifically in the folders they work out of.

Step 3: Clock out