A while back I wrote about the SharePoint Migration Tool. Today I will share my experiences of the SharePoint Migration Manager.
Why SharePoint Migration Manager?
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SharePoint Migration Manager is almost the same as the SharePoint Migration Tool.
When you look at the task settings for example, you wouldn’t really notice any difference.
Architecturally however there is a large difference. The SharePoint migration manager uses agents to do exactly the same as the migration tool.
You can have multiple agents sharing the load of the migration.
And as agents are progressing the tasks you can see fro each task how much progress has been made.
You can even run multiple migration tasks at the same time, but once you start using the SharePoint migration manager in real environments you will find that things don’t always turn green as shown below. In this post I’m hoping to help a bit with the more challenging situations.
Failing migrations
Quite often you will find that some migrations work and some migration don’t work. It might sometimes feel like just random behaviour.
But there are a lot of factors that can be important.
- Resources available to the agents ( disk space, CPU power, memory, network speed)
- Stability of the infrastructure
- Users
Time to have a look at some of the failures that may occur. When you click on the Download failure report a zip file is downloaded with a variety of csv files in it.
When things go seriously wrong there will be a FatalError_R1.csv file. this file will contain a reason for the migration manager to completely stop a migration task.
Some examples of errors that I found during some of the migration are:
- ScanSharePoint Access Failure – Web issue. URL: https://myorg.sharepoint.com/sites/staff/Shared Documents User: account@myorg.onmicrosoft.com
- Temporary storage on your local computer is too low.
Both these error messages are quite annoying and not completely clear.
The itemFailureReport_R1.csv is another one of those files to have a look at. you might get errors like this:
- Scan File Failure:Path contains invalid characters. Valid path doesn’t start or end with space. Other invalid characters are <, ?, >, *, |, “, :, \, /
- Scan File Failure:Unauthorized access to source folder
- Failed to Read the file:Could not retrieve file’s metadata
- Packaging Failure:Unauthorized access to source file
For these file related issues you will need to adjust file names and make sure that your migration account has access to the files.
On the fatal errors however we have to use a different trick.
Temporary storage on your local computer is too low
The Temporary storage on your local computer is too low error is very uinclear. My system has plenty of space and it doesn’t look like this is a problem, until I found the following article with a great solution:
The problem is the space in %appData%\Microsoft. this is most likely on your C-Drive and the idea is to use a different storeage space somewhere.
So you would need to delete the MigrationToolStorage folder in %Appdata%/Microsoft and then run the following two commands to create a link to a different storage with more space.
cd %appdata%\Microsoft
mklink /J MigrationToolStorage Z:\SomeOtherFolderThis solution isn’t just more stable it also makes the migration tool run a lot faster as my alternative storage is a lot faster than using the system drives.
Alternatively you can also go to the Agent settings and change the working folder to a different drive so that the migration manager uses that folder instead.
Ok, that is a great solution. Hopefully this will help someone else too.
How does migration manager (office 365)migrate modified files after completing the first task? Let’s say first time I ran migration task, it transferred all files to sharepoint library, how will it move modified or new files after that before the switchover?
If I run task again, will this only transfer modified/new files or will re-transfer all files again?
I twill scan through all files and only copy modified files
hi, any ideas on this error, ScanSharePoint Access Failure – Web issue
HI Michael,
That sounds like there are issues getting to the SharePoint site.Can you check that the account running the migration agent can access the SharePoint site?
Changing the temporary storage area made everything so much faster and more consistent.
However your commands didn’t work for me, however you can change the settings inside the migration job itself (which persists between different jobs) in the tool which is easier and more user friendly (some people get unnerved when using command prompt)
Your article prompted me to change this so thank you very much.
Hi! What seems to be the issue with this error? Invalid source folder ”. Reason: ‘Root folder does not exist’
Why do I get this when my agent is installed and the server drives are mapped to that laptop?
Can you supply the details of the configuration. Feel free to send it to me on the chat.
Hello All!
Can anyone tell me that what could be the issue behind error “Failed to access local storage”. I am running the Migration and its keep failing after reaching 30-40%.
Any help will be highly appreciated
HI Surya,
It sounds like an issue with the local storage to me. When this happened are you still able to access the file systems through File Explorer?
Thank you, this article looks helpful, also you can directly use tools like ShareGate or Gs Richcopy 360 to perform this file server migration to Sharepoint quickly and easily
Yes you can. But you do pay for those products.
Yes, and we still use it
Good. I do too, where suitable. Sometimes one tool is better sometimes the other tool is better.
Hi Friends, this vlog is very helpful, I wanted to add some more tricks which I found during migration of data from local machine to onedrive. for example if you have 20 GB of free space in C drive then only Migrate below 20 GB data to One Drive otherwise it will fail again and it will give error not enough space , it make a cache copy of data in this “MigrationToolStorage” folder once data migrated its cache file automatically deleted and C drive will get free space again automatically.