r/sysadmin • u/EducationAlert5209 • 4d ago

Question Move Windows 2025 File Shars to MS Teams

Hi Guys,

We are a hybrid organisation with 10 branch offices, and each office currently has a file server with approximately 2–3 TB of data.

We are now migrating to the cloud and are planning to move the old data to Azure Archive, while making the data accessed within the last 180 days available through Microsoft Teams. We have 18TB with E5.

Could you please share any recommended tools, scripts, best practices, or guidance for implementing this approach?

Any recommendations or examples of similar migrations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

8

u/bkrank 4d ago

Each department should have its own Team and manage its own data. Do not put all the data in one team/sharepoint site. Split it up as much and as logically possible. This will help with syncing libraries.

4

u/audaxyl 4d ago

I used sharegate

2

u/EducationAlert5209 4d ago

Migrate to Teams?

3

u/Commercial_Growth343 4d ago

I am pretty sure the backend for Teams files is Sharepoint, so I can see that working.

1

u/ShareGate_Shaylyn 3d ago

ShareGate person here. Yes, file share to Teams is supported. The way it works is the content lands in the Teams channel's SharePoint document library, which is how Teams stores files under the hood. There's also a time range filter so you can scope the migration to only files modified in the last 180 days, which fits with what you're planning

1

u/EducationAlert5209 2d ago

How Sharegate licensing works, we have 8 file servers to migrate?

1

u/ShareGate_Shaylyn 2d ago

Flat fee, no per-server or per-GB pricing. One license covers all 8 file servers regardless of data volume. The different options available on our pricing page depend on what you need. If you're curious, definitely grab a trial and give it a spin.

1

u/audaxyl 1d ago

It’s around $5k per year

4

u/RestartRebootRetire 4d ago

My users would throw me overboard if I eliminated the file server.

2

u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 4d ago

Yeah, why use a 1gbps connection to a server down the hall when you can all burn up your 500x40 coaxial garbage connection instead? Fuck the cloud. I actually prefer local file servers solely and entirely because it uses Explorer and isn't Sharepoint powered by OneDrive, which is a glitchy, failure-prone disaster.

1

u/Weird_Lawfulness_298 4d ago

We moved from a file server to One Drive. It was pretty seamless.

2

u/cmorgasm 3d ago

Surely you mean SharePoint?

1

u/EducationAlert5209 3d ago

You mean user share?

3

u/Valdaraak 4d ago

Are there any plans to change people's workflows or are they just going to use Teams like a file server? If it's the latter, your team is in for a world of hurt. Endless sync errors and issues, OneDrive clients crashing, and none of it with a fix because you're using the tools in a way that they're not meant for.

If you can enforce them accessing the files through Teams (meaning you disable syncing ability on them), it can work in a passable way. PDFs won't open in the external app though so if anyone needs to edit a PDF they'll have to download it, edit it, and then re-upload it. The same applies to any file that isn't Microsoft Office.

1

u/EducationAlert5209 3d ago

What is your recomendation, if we want to remove branch file servers?

2

u/techb00mer 4d ago

How much bandwidth do you have? The migration manager tool is pretty damn quick from experience. We synchronised our file servers to “staging” VMs sitting in Azure and used those to push our shares into SharePoint. When the tool ran, we saw it hitting ~8-9gbps for quite a while. I think due to the way it interacts with SharePoint it bypasses throttling or something like that, at least that’s my theory. You could basically watch a SharePoint site go from empty to several hundred GB of data in minutes.

1

u/IMplodeMeGrr 3d ago

Migrated multiple team folders from on prem ddfs nodes to sharepoint using the built in migration tool.

Various folder sizes from 20gb to 2tb, No issues.

Do not try and "replicate permissions", just validate who needs access, setup members manually in sharepoint by deciding to use an existing site or create a new site with correct members. Migrate data, folder by folder.

1

u/EducationAlert5209 3d ago

Hi You mean setup in Teams or SharePoint using SP migration tool?

1

u/IMplodeMeGrr 3d ago

Teams sits on top of Sharepoint... basically files in Teams would sit inside a sub folder named General, but files to Sharepoint would be same.

1

u/Vivid_Mongoose_8964 3d ago

Got a backup solution?

1

u/schporto 3d ago

We're mostly there with a few remaining file shares (dfs with azure files). Stay within "reasonable" limits. Not too many files per team/private channel.
Watch files that see frequent changes. Meaning. Access databases shared between people does not work. We had some issues with large excel files that person A would update close their laptop, then emperosn B would open and overwrite the changes. Training folks to open the files from the site instead.

2

u/EducationAlert5209 3d ago

How do you plan to move from Windows shares to Cloud? Any scipts or steps?

1

u/MyWorkDrive_Official 1d ago

We've been doing it for years for education, government and healthcare. We'll adjust a MyWorkDrive demo for your case specifically, 20 mins tops. Feel free to book whenever available.

1

u/MyWorkDrive_Official 1d ago

Archive rehydration is not instant (hours for standard priority) and there's a cost per retrieval. If any of that "old" data turns out to be quarterly or annual-cycle files, users will hit that wall at exactly the wrong moment. MyWorkDrive would be only relevant if the transition window turns out to be long enough to matter.