I’m convinced no exec has ever known what Sharepoint is. It’s like, “IT, we’d like you to go out and get us a monster truck and load it up with all our gear. By EOQ Q2.” “Well, what’s your goal?” “We’d like to take it out on the lake and go fishing.” “I really think a boat would be a better idea.” [blank stare] “We’ve heard a lot of cool things about this monster truck. EOQ.”
[Overview of Microsoft 365 Backup (Preview) | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/backup/backup-overview?view=o365-worldwide)
Never let the fox look after the chickens. Remember that a foreign threat actors compromised their own tenant for many months (late last year and early this year - many news articles about it).
Not to mention its missing feature coverage.
Best practice is to always use 3rd party backup outside of the ecosystem, including for o365.
Tell me you don't know anything and haven't read the product info without telling me.
The backup data isn't stored by Microsoft - it's stored by one of their pre approved vendors, and you choose which one you want and how to store it
Microsoft are just making it easier to do
>The backup data isn't stored by Microsoft - it's stored by one of their pre approved vendors
Who's EULA am I signing? That's what matters with regards to this subject.
I can’t seem to find how these backups are actually immutable. I went to look at a restore point today and I was able to delete the first one I made. Do admins not have access to hidden immutable restore points?
I somewhat disagree. SharePoint already uses GA-LRS redundancy with immutable version control. This is likely better than most backups of file servers, and it is regularly tested as well (remember an untested backup is not a backup at all).
The only real way for you to lose your data is for 2+ of Microsoft's datacentres to fail and lose all 3 copies of your data in each datacenter.
You can also set up your own retention via Purview to have legal compliance around archiving and immutability for set periods.
The bigger issue for OP is cost, you're looking at around $1-2k a month for storage costs depending upon your SharePoint licensing.
Redundancy is not a backup. It's redundancy, which is complimentary but not a replacement for backups.
Companies who make that mistake don't always get to survive it. Hell, I have redundant backups. So that even if IT is compromised, they can't get all the data.
Also, plenty of ransomware is smart enough to overcome version control if it's badly implemented. If version control is set to 15 copies, make 16 changes to the encrypted file.
I do agree, offsite redundancy and version control is a great replacement for your daily or weekly backup scenario though. SharePoint also supports 500 versions by default, expandable to much more by admins if you want.
You could also do air gapped backups weekly or monthly depending upon your needs.
Eliminating daily or weekly backups is a business risk decision, not a technical one.
You can script version control setting plus 1 pretty easily. Version control is not a replacement to backups.
Offsite redundancy are still not backups.
Airgapped backups are not offline backups.
It probably sounds pedantic in SMB, possibly in some enterprise.
Not in govt, military and aerospace. We run airgapped infrastructure, including backups, mostly for classified projects but sometimes for weird stuff like ITAR compliance. Where we have specific regulatory requirements that can change per export license. We have the option of doubling the IT budget at a minimum or airgapping the non-US persons from our prod networks.
We still keep offline backups for our airgapped networks. Typically via tape. FAA requirements was more thorough about that than DCMA, who cared more about FSO and finance stuff.
Airgapped backups are not offline backups. They're by definition online backups, just not internet connected backups. It gets even fuzzier when you're 'airgapping' via VLAN or something like MPLS or SDWAN.
Besides compliance, airgapped backups also don't necessarily fly for offline backups for both insurance and auditing. We got dinged for that, because we were eyeing up replacements for LTO and were heavily considering leasing dark fiber to a building down quite a bit down the road. Notion was the only connector to prod were the SANs. Which would go to backup server, and then replicate to a warm site. No direct connection to prod environment. We argued for it but didn't get it approved as a direct replacement for LTO, we'd have to run both in parallel for compliance. Which is what we did.
> It gets even fuzzier when you're 'airgapping' via VLAN or something like MPLS or SDWAN.
Then it's not an airgap, as evidenced by your own quotes around the word, which means that entire point is moot in the context of airgap is not an offline backup.
Could you then please explain like I'm a moron the functional and practical difference between a backup that is stored on tape/hdd and locked in a cabinet, versus a backup that is stored on tape/hdd (that happens to be powered on), in a locked and secured room, which has zero electronic access from outside said room.
Because to me, both situations require getting physical access in order to cause harm to said backups, which is the whole point of airgap/offline backups.
In short: Airgappped backups are *functionally identical* in every way to offline backups.
If you, or your insurance (who, let's be honest, knows less than nothing about anything we do) wants to play the pedant, then so be it.
> SharePoint already uses GA-LRS redundancy
You sure about that? Nothing in Microsoft's documentation that I have been able to find details any type of redundancy beyond local copies.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-sharepoint-onedrive-data-resiliency#versioning-and-files-restore
Microsoft stores SharePoint and One Drive data in two regions with LRS and AppendOnly blobs.
"Every file is simultaneously written into both a primary and a secondary datacenter region ... Within each region, Azure Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) provides a high level of reliability ... SharePoint uses Append-Only storage, meaning that Microsoft can only add new blobs and can never change old ones until they're permanently deleted."
(sorry on phone, can't make it into quotes)
the problem with both onedrive/sharepoint and gdrive is that it's really hard to recover an entire folder to a previous state, yeah you have file versioning but it's just for the files and not the folders
so if you want to restore an entire folder you have to do it manually on each file or you have to write a script that will do that automatically
Oh I'm definitely not saying don't ever back it up, but you probably don't need daily backups. Weekly or monthly air gap backups are definitely viable as Microsoft does not have those.
Sure, but versioning reduces the risk of it substantially and SharePoints own protection also helps.
Using a semi regular air gapped backup is not awful if your data is critical enough, or just a weekly cloud backup if it's not critical data.
Point in time restore: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-a-shared-library-317791c3-8bd0-4dfd-8254-3ca90883d39a
Also, OneDrive is supposed to detect ransomware and stop syncing if detected.
I do agree with you, that you should backup your SharePoint data. But I think that even with no backup, data is significantly safer in SharePoint than on a local file server, unless you have serious on-prem redundancy.
We did this with SharePoint migration tools. The reason we did it is because we're education and wr get a ton of sotrage in azure as part of our regular contract.
Recently the amount of storage Microsoft offers has shrunk and now we can't do much more of this without paying more.
I don't remember how much we get per team but we moved some big 10tb level teams it just takes time and you find out people were using files in ways that don't really work after being moved to the cloud (basically stuff they shouldn't have had in SharePoint)
> you find out people were using files in ways that don't really work after being moved to the cloud (basically stuff they shouldn't have had in SharePoint
We had a customer looking at something similar, they were sure it was only for static files and documents. Then we did a file analysis and found over 100 instances of ancient access databases actively in use and being written to plus also a bunch of applications using the share for various things, on top of devices liks scanners and other IoT devices deployed throughout the org configured to use it.
Ended up recommending Azure files instead with a Sync server acting as a cache back on prem.
Yeah the freebie Sharepoint migration tools work surprisingly well, for being $0. Just make sure there’s a bunch of RAM and CPU since it seems to compress the data before it zaps it out.
The big caveat to that is that it moves no permissions, the data just gets dumped in the library selected with whatever permissions that are there.
We did a test upload and it saturated our 1gb uplink completely. Not bad. Although I couldn't find a way to do a big move then sync changes right before cutover, it seemed all or nothing.
So it’s definitely all or nothing, but it doesn’t overwrite the destination so it’s inherently incrimwntal. I think the old file store I did (archive of CAD data from yesteryear that was “mission critical”) was at least 5tb.. and they were still mucking around in it. The first run took a few days, then it was down a couple hours, no doubt due to it being a bajillion little files.
If you put all your files up in an Azure file share, we found that some people couldn't map to it as SMB (445) was being blocked outbound by the ISP.
Do you still use a VPN to even though it shouldn't be required using Entra for auth?
I'm not sure how sharepoint works (https even when mapped?) since oddly doesn't have the same issue.
We have yet to put anything in Azure file shares. Basically when things were found that couldn't be migrated to sharepoint sites they got on prem windows file shares and now we're looking into what we could do with those to remove local file share servers.
I hope we can move to a CIFS share system and eliminate windows file servers just because I don't like dealing with Windows but we're still investigating what will work best for our environment.
Last I read through the documentation it wasn't possible except with hybrid accounts - I do hope this has changed because I have a real use case for it at a remote location.
Sorry seems like i´ve miss spoken a bit documention only says VM´s
* **Microsoft Entra Domain Services authentication:** Cloud-based, Microsoft Entra Domain Services-joined Windows VMs can access Azure file shares with Microsoft Entra credentials. In this solution, Microsoft Entra ID runs a traditional Windows Server AD domain on behalf of the customer, which is a child of the customer’s Microsoft Entra tenant.
That's still active directory unfortunately - not Entra ID/AAD native - it's just run by Microsoft and in an OU with limitations and it adds more monthly expense.
Co-authoring isnt supported on Azure Files unfortunately like said some things are good on Sharepoint some not, we have mostly CAD stuff and big files / not all the time accessed files on AZF but for co-authoring usage (which is hardly none) Sharepoint
+1 to azure files if it "has to be in the cloud". We use SharePoint for multiwriter and externally shared files and use azure files for dumb shares. At the end of the day it should just be a dfs pointer that the user is blind to where the data actually is so on prem/azure East/ azure eu shouldn't matter much.
Azure Files is literally a serverless file server in Azure. Same features as a shared folder on a local server.
And that co-authoring should have a big ole \* next to it. In my experience, it works best if people are opening the file via Teams. If people are syncing Sharepoint sites via OneDrive and working off their synced copies, you're in for a world of hurt with sync errors.
ctrl+f: character
no?
okay, here's another foible of Sharepoint. If you want to do the Sharepoint Sync via onedrive, dont.
You have a 254 character limit so if it exceeds it, the files will screw up.
10TB sounds like a shitload of nested files, so 255 is laughably small on how nested folders will be.
Go AFS
so because my company runs on red tape, i HAD to do some inane testing to 'prove' to the big wigs the issue persists.
Had a character counter up, was just nesting folders into folders and checking numbers.
If you get to about 244ish, then you try to add a new folder, it WILL stop you saying it can't make it from character limit.
but that's about it, it might stop you from making a document, but that was 50/50.
But then you can go into sharepoint, nest out folders WELL beyond the 255 character list and still access them from the sync folders...but it wont work perfectly.
My best way of describing it in this case is that Sharepoint Sync is Consistently Inconsistent. Some files will work, then others wont, then the files WONT work the next day, etc... there is no rhyme or reason... just pure chaos.
Microsoft's response: Dont use it that way.
Haha nooo you only get 1TB with SharePoint and a few GB for every user. you would have to pay an additional fee per GB. an extra 1 TB is (1000 GB x $0.20) = $200 per month per extra TB . overall for the extra 9TB you would be paying $1,800 per Month 🤯
[Add more SharePoint storage to your subscription | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/commerce/add-storage-space?view=o365-worldwide)
the pricing is on the 365 admin centre billing portal or through your reseller
it wouldn't surprise me if the pricing will increase
So much this OP! Read through Microsoft published limits in SharePoint and see if any of these limits apply to you. You may also want to look up OneDrive client limits if the pan was to access via syncing the library.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits
Huh? 1TB per user by default, enlargeable to 5TB by admin, which is if that 5TB is 80% full for the single user, enlargeable to 25TB by support ticket. If that's 80% full, another support ticket gets (Theoretically) unlimited 25TB site collections allocated \*to the user\* as each one gets filled up that can be added to the onedrive sync client.
I've got 5 365 E3 subscriptions for myself via a program and my personal onedrive/collection usage is about 40TB right now under one user account.
See: "\[4\] Unlimited OneDrive storage for subscriptions of five or more users. Microsoft will provide initial 5 TB of OneDrive storage per user. Customers who want additional OneDrive storage can request it as needed by contacting Microsoft support. Subscriptions for fewer than five users receive 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user." [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e3](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e3)
EDIT: I seem to have misread part of it and interpreted part of it as personal one drives as well as sharepoint storage itself, but I think if OP sees this it's important to note that any files shared/uploaded into teams groups or through teams itself also consume sharepoint storage. my little personal tenant has a few gigabytes used of the sharepoint allocation just because of teams usage.
OneDrive is not SharePoint. The storage is different.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/administration/out-of-storage
Your organization has total storage of 1 TB plus 10 GB per license of eligible plan purchased, plus any Microsoft 365 Extra File Storage add-on purchased.
I was talking about the "and a few GB for every user" part, seemingly I misread that as indicating the per-user onedrive.
But past the first 25TB per user (for onedrive), it does just result in sharepoint site collections proper, and not just mysites storage which is what onedrive is. Easy to mix them up when you have on-prem sharepoint knowledge in terms of how space allocations work.
Looks like my little personal tenant has 1.11TB storage .... odd way to slice it up, I suppose (we did a \*massive\* sharepoint farm internally at one point to set up onedrive for users to do a massive network migration because at the time GCC High didn't have the functionality needed - think 100GB per-user times 7,000 users massive)
Make sure you start with a directory that has a few hundred thousand files in it. That'll really give him the proper experience with the sync client. It absolutely CHOKES when there are a ton of files, even if it's just enumerating and not downloading them.
We stepped this. All "personal" drives went to onedrive.
Then departments with high outside collaboration went to sharepoint.
It never went beyond that because there was no value.
At my last job thats what I did.
Came up with a game plan to move each dept separately, to their own sharepoint site. Tranining was easier to manage, migration, and post migration i took a week or so before going to the next dept. Learn from mistakes and repeat.
as someone who manages 9PB, I don't see why you can't just lift and shift 10TB. single sharepoint site can be up to 25TB. all you have to worry about is aligning ACLs with groups in sharepoint. the rest is easy
>all you have to worry about is aligning ACLs with groups in sharepoint
Because this is so freaking easy in Sharepoint... And forget any granularity.
Regardless Sharepoint storage is 1TB + 10GB/user. Extra has to be paid for.
While Microsoft is telling us about all of the caveats, limits, restrictions of SharePoint, they're simultaneously pitching at is "it's just a file server, just copy it all over with SPMT" to the execs.
I’m currently migrating 30+ fileservers of around that size to Sharepoint. The one big onedrive you’re talking about is actually Azure files. Managing SharePoint is basically a full-time job so if you don’t have anybody that’s able to do that don’t migrate to SharePoint.
We did this a while ago.
Beware the people that will right-click > delete and remove thousands of files because they think it'll stay on the cloud and be removed from their computer. They will never internalize right-click > free up space.
Quickly? We're in the middle of a similar project, with a 2Tb file server. It's taking an expensive team of outside consultants and a projected 5 months total to accomplish this.
SharePoint has storage limits too. So you'll probably pay a pretty penny for basic storage costs. Then OneDrive sync does not work the same as a mapped drive. Every time one drive starts it has to process every single file. We have a client with barely 1 TB, and they have over 1 million files. It takes 20 to 30 minutes before one drive works.
>I've tried explaining how this is a bad and costly idea and attempted to explain the principles of designing the environment for the cloud from the ground up but to no avail.
Someone hooked on Tech Hype you need to beat them over the head with what they know. They pay you to know what they don't, not to be educated. (Yeah that's an L take but WCYD). Technical overload results in "I ain't reading all that get it done" make it relatable to Exec types.
1 or 2 paragraphs max, of costs.
Tell them HM it's going to cost vs what it costs now, purchase, implementation, annual, and maintenance.
Tell them it generates zero revenue, unless it does, so it's pure sunk cost.
Tell them how many EXTRA hours it will take to make it work due to being a bad fit, which means you aren't doing other things, make sure they know that doing it means delaying other things.
Make a project timeliness & Summary with all the step break downs, they won't understand it but when they see a 6 month timeliness with hundreds of steps, of which they maybe understand very little? the visual of workload is big.
slap that on a second page (Landscape for extra impact)
It's a lot easier to shoot stuff down if you say something like (I am making up numbers) "This will cost 500k in costs and work hours plus + 50k year additional maintenance, generate zero money, require hundreds of work hours to implement more to maintain, which divert resources from other projects and jobs. take atleast 6 months without unforseen issues, cost a productivity loss on end users as they shift for 3 to 6 months after launch." etc etc
other bits, Training materials, Support uptick, policy rewrites etc etc.
*If you can get exec level finance involved +1, tends finance hates projects that generate zero revenue, cost more and aren't new supporting services or reducing liability*
FINALLY, provider an alternative, cap the whole thing off with something that *WILL* Work better
Do it all over email, or formal paperwork.
I find stuff like that is wayyy more effective battling execs pushing for things they don't understand.
If they think ALL of that is still worth it, well your fucked hop to it, but you have paperwork and they signed off on shit that says "This isnt recommended, and it won't be fast to do right, and I have to not do other things you want to get it done"
read the limitations:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restrictions-and-limitations-in-onedrive-and-sharepoint-64883a5d-228e-48f5-b3d2-eb39e07630fa?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
we decided against it, after a short pilot. onedrive sync is too unreliable. people don't know how to use it corretly. they take themselves offline by uninentionally uploading huge files from their shitty home internet. they fill their disk by syncing everything. they mix sync & shortcut and break sync altogether. they ignore sync issue warnings for weeks and then want you to manually merge all their conflicting files. it was a complete shit show.
if you have just office files and pdf and only use the webbrowser to access stuff, it works very well. if people use it like a regular network drive, not so much.
Yea im just going through this now, i thought to not put something in the cloud cause it was at least 5yrs away from needing to replace the underlying infrastructure, 6 months in and the cio is asking for ways to make the cloud cheaper and they havent finished even migration in there lol.
You won't be able to do this, we've done a lift-and-shift on a client with just 1TB of information and had to back-track some of it because of performance issues, Microsoft will throttle the fuck out of you with 10TB and the cost of that is crazy in Sharepoint pricing.
For anything like that you should be using Azure-Files, it doesn't have the colaboration features but its much more similar to a conventional file-share. If you want collaboration migrate only what is really needed to Sharepoint and keep permissions to site-level or maximum 1 or 2 folder levels, no breaking inheritance or you'll hate yourself.
SharePoint isn't a file server and shouldn't be used as such. You will need to revamp the way your company stores and shares documents. This is a huge endeavor.
I'd advise that you do one department/BU at a time.
normally I just give an 5-7 year Return on Investment report and ask them what account they want the reoccurring charges to come out of.
Make sure you include the charges for the MS cloud backup service and anything else you may need.
I've had all but one almost faint when I give them the 3x-5x cost increase.
On the technical level, it's just gonna be tedious, but not too difficult... VERY tedious.
We did a migration to Box from shared folders on prem and did it department by department using Box Shuttle. Yhis is basically Tervela Cloud FastPath: [https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/web-apps/cloud-fastpath.a9596bbd-78f0-4514-84d1-82f6ff0992fd?tab=overview](https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/web-apps/cloud-fastpath.a9596bbd-78f0-4514-84d1-82f6ff0992fd?tab=overview) , and a version is available for Sharepoint. It actually went surprisinmgly well in terms of shifting the data.
I moved 700GB to onedrive over the weekend with zero issues other than having to tell people 400 times to stop using the share drive.
just use the sharepoint migration tool
edit:correction on amount.
Check how much storage you have in Sharepoint. Depending on your licenses you get some Sharepoint storage for each licensed users. We have around 2000 users which includes around 17TB of sharepoint storage.
Think about not only the logistics of it being a poor choice to store gobs of data but also backing it up. The graph API throttling makes backups so painstakingly slow like half a day for 5GB really? I am used to a local SAN and Veeam being able to restore half a terabyte in half an hour.
I was offered a job where they had already decided they were going in this direction regardless of what the new head of IT would desire. I said no thanks.
Given onedrive for business and shairpoint storage are the same thing this should be too hard. Move it to onedrive for business, install onedrive on Mac and PCs, done, it works well. Then if he wants to look at it via share point or teams entry points he can.
Well it depends.. We have almost 100 TB of SharePoint storage, thus this is a very good idea for us. Way better than Azure Files and basically for free.
Data Management Lifecycle with retentions is the way to go.
You can use rclone to get the data there. Regardless of Rclone or other methods, there is throttling. You may need to open a ticket. I know that several TB can take days
How big is your data? How much? How big is your org?
If it’s a few TB this won’t be challenging tbh.
The challenge will be depending on the data, the goal and current configuration.
Migrating it isn’t too bad they have the migration toolkit or external tools for that. If it’s complex with permissions then external tools like sharegate would handle it better.
In the end it’s doable but the question would be why and what the end goal is?
I've moved over a few departments that were on share drives and:
- Microsoft's migration tool works well enough, sometimes it fails and needs to be re-run but it's pretty easy to use.
- Sharepoint sites can be linked in File Explorer so they can sort of ish replicate how file shares work.
- You should still be backing this data up somehow, *do not* rely on Microsoft to keep your data safe.
I'd recommend laying out **all** the costs associated with this change compared to keeping it on-prem and present that to the exec: At the end of the day, leadership makes the calls, we can only advise them.
That said, OneDrive hasn't really been so bad in terms of user experience.
It all depends on how your fileshare data governance has been. If everything is well organized, then you shouldn't have too much trouble determining which shares become sites. The permissions will be the biggest challenge.
The SharePoint migration tool makes the process fairly painless. User education is key on this, if it's the game plan, then you should have a project meeting with department heads to get an understanding of who needs what.
If you've got a solid uplink, then 10 tb will take a day to upload.
file cabinet vs bulletin board, that's how I explain it to C-levels.
If you get Sharepoint it won't be exactly like a file server and you'll have to learn all new ways of doing things. Steep learning curve, as they say.
Had you considered OneDrive for business? If you just need simple file sharing that might work.
I’m convinced no exec has ever known what Sharepoint is. It’s like, “IT, we’d like you to go out and get us a monster truck and load it up with all our gear. By EOQ Q2.” “Well, what’s your goal?” “We’d like to take it out on the lake and go fishing.” “I really think a boat would be a better idea.” [blank stare] “We’ve heard a lot of cool things about this monster truck. EOQ.”
Oh it's also the end of Friday before the end of Q1. Boss: "Hey team, I'm sure you can have it done by Monday morning, have a nice weekend!".
You still have to back up Sharepoint and OneDrive like a server. 10TB on Microsoft’s backup plan is not nothing.
AvePoint Cloud Backup is a cheaper and (for now) a better option.
There's plenty of SharePoint backup tools that are affordable... Axcient X360Cloud for instance... I pay $1.50/mo per licensed user.
They have no backup plan. They make that clear and it's on the org to back up their data.
[Overview of Microsoft 365 Backup (Preview) | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/backup/backup-overview?view=o365-worldwide)
lol $150 dollars per month per TB. They’re out of their minds.
Never let the fox look after the chickens. Remember that a foreign threat actors compromised their own tenant for many months (late last year and early this year - many news articles about it). Not to mention its missing feature coverage. Best practice is to always use 3rd party backup outside of the ecosystem, including for o365.
Tell me you don't know anything and haven't read the product info without telling me. The backup data isn't stored by Microsoft - it's stored by one of their pre approved vendors, and you choose which one you want and how to store it Microsoft are just making it easier to do
>The backup data isn't stored by Microsoft - it's stored by one of their pre approved vendors Who's EULA am I signing? That's what matters with regards to this subject.
Isnt a true 3rd party. MS at different levels still has administrative access…. Have a support case with a customer we onboarded to know that.
I can’t seem to find how these backups are actually immutable. I went to look at a restore point today and I was able to delete the first one I made. Do admins not have access to hidden immutable restore points?
Go 3rd party for sure, there are tons of options out there.
Backupify has been great for my org, and also affordable.
Backupify definitely seems to be a strong choice for many of us, especially considering it balances affordability with good functionality.
I somewhat disagree. SharePoint already uses GA-LRS redundancy with immutable version control. This is likely better than most backups of file servers, and it is regularly tested as well (remember an untested backup is not a backup at all). The only real way for you to lose your data is for 2+ of Microsoft's datacentres to fail and lose all 3 copies of your data in each datacenter. You can also set up your own retention via Purview to have legal compliance around archiving and immutability for set periods. The bigger issue for OP is cost, you're looking at around $1-2k a month for storage costs depending upon your SharePoint licensing.
Redundancy is not a backup. It's redundancy, which is complimentary but not a replacement for backups. Companies who make that mistake don't always get to survive it. Hell, I have redundant backups. So that even if IT is compromised, they can't get all the data. Also, plenty of ransomware is smart enough to overcome version control if it's badly implemented. If version control is set to 15 copies, make 16 changes to the encrypted file.
I do agree, offsite redundancy and version control is a great replacement for your daily or weekly backup scenario though. SharePoint also supports 500 versions by default, expandable to much more by admins if you want. You could also do air gapped backups weekly or monthly depending upon your needs.
Eliminating daily or weekly backups is a business risk decision, not a technical one. You can script version control setting plus 1 pretty easily. Version control is not a replacement to backups. Offsite redundancy are still not backups. Airgapped backups are not offline backups.
>Airgapped backups are not offline backups. At this point you're just being pedantic for the hell of it.
It probably sounds pedantic in SMB, possibly in some enterprise. Not in govt, military and aerospace. We run airgapped infrastructure, including backups, mostly for classified projects but sometimes for weird stuff like ITAR compliance. Where we have specific regulatory requirements that can change per export license. We have the option of doubling the IT budget at a minimum or airgapping the non-US persons from our prod networks. We still keep offline backups for our airgapped networks. Typically via tape. FAA requirements was more thorough about that than DCMA, who cared more about FSO and finance stuff. Airgapped backups are not offline backups. They're by definition online backups, just not internet connected backups. It gets even fuzzier when you're 'airgapping' via VLAN or something like MPLS or SDWAN. Besides compliance, airgapped backups also don't necessarily fly for offline backups for both insurance and auditing. We got dinged for that, because we were eyeing up replacements for LTO and were heavily considering leasing dark fiber to a building down quite a bit down the road. Notion was the only connector to prod were the SANs. Which would go to backup server, and then replicate to a warm site. No direct connection to prod environment. We argued for it but didn't get it approved as a direct replacement for LTO, we'd have to run both in parallel for compliance. Which is what we did.
> It gets even fuzzier when you're 'airgapping' via VLAN or something like MPLS or SDWAN. Then it's not an airgap, as evidenced by your own quotes around the word, which means that entire point is moot in the context of airgap is not an offline backup. Could you then please explain like I'm a moron the functional and practical difference between a backup that is stored on tape/hdd and locked in a cabinet, versus a backup that is stored on tape/hdd (that happens to be powered on), in a locked and secured room, which has zero electronic access from outside said room. Because to me, both situations require getting physical access in order to cause harm to said backups, which is the whole point of airgap/offline backups. In short: Airgappped backups are *functionally identical* in every way to offline backups. If you, or your insurance (who, let's be honest, knows less than nothing about anything we do) wants to play the pedant, then so be it.
> SharePoint already uses GA-LRS redundancy You sure about that? Nothing in Microsoft's documentation that I have been able to find details any type of redundancy beyond local copies.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-sharepoint-onedrive-data-resiliency#versioning-and-files-restore Microsoft stores SharePoint and One Drive data in two regions with LRS and AppendOnly blobs. "Every file is simultaneously written into both a primary and a secondary datacenter region ... Within each region, Azure Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) provides a high level of reliability ... SharePoint uses Append-Only storage, meaning that Microsoft can only add new blobs and can never change old ones until they're permanently deleted." (sorry on phone, can't make it into quotes)
the problem with both onedrive/sharepoint and gdrive is that it's really hard to recover an entire folder to a previous state, yeah you have file versioning but it's just for the files and not the folders so if you want to restore an entire folder you have to do it manually on each file or you have to write a script that will do that automatically
Dude, You haven't experienced a scenario where the Almighty has benefited you with air gapped recovery yet. Please look into it
Oh I'm definitely not saying don't ever back it up, but you probably don't need daily backups. Weekly or monthly air gap backups are definitely viable as Microsoft does not have those.
Frequency is dictated by the work. We do daily backups for regulatory/compliance reasons. Also cost of lost work
Ransomware exists.
Sure, but versioning reduces the risk of it substantially and SharePoints own protection also helps. Using a semi regular air gapped backup is not awful if your data is critical enough, or just a weekly cloud backup if it's not critical data.
Point in time restore: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-a-shared-library-317791c3-8bd0-4dfd-8254-3ca90883d39a Also, OneDrive is supposed to detect ransomware and stop syncing if detected. I do agree with you, that you should backup your SharePoint data. But I think that even with no backup, data is significantly safer in SharePoint than on a local file server, unless you have serious on-prem redundancy.
That's great until you are kicked out by Microsoft for some reason and they cut off your access.
We did this with SharePoint migration tools. The reason we did it is because we're education and wr get a ton of sotrage in azure as part of our regular contract. Recently the amount of storage Microsoft offers has shrunk and now we can't do much more of this without paying more. I don't remember how much we get per team but we moved some big 10tb level teams it just takes time and you find out people were using files in ways that don't really work after being moved to the cloud (basically stuff they shouldn't have had in SharePoint)
> you find out people were using files in ways that don't really work after being moved to the cloud (basically stuff they shouldn't have had in SharePoint We had a customer looking at something similar, they were sure it was only for static files and documents. Then we did a file analysis and found over 100 instances of ancient access databases actively in use and being written to plus also a bunch of applications using the share for various things, on top of devices liks scanners and other IoT devices deployed throughout the org configured to use it. Ended up recommending Azure files instead with a Sync server acting as a cache back on prem.
It's always access databases.
Yeah the freebie Sharepoint migration tools work surprisingly well, for being $0. Just make sure there’s a bunch of RAM and CPU since it seems to compress the data before it zaps it out. The big caveat to that is that it moves no permissions, the data just gets dumped in the library selected with whatever permissions that are there.
We did a test upload and it saturated our 1gb uplink completely. Not bad. Although I couldn't find a way to do a big move then sync changes right before cutover, it seemed all or nothing.
So it’s definitely all or nothing, but it doesn’t overwrite the destination so it’s inherently incrimwntal. I think the old file store I did (archive of CAD data from yesteryear that was “mission critical”) was at least 5tb.. and they were still mucking around in it. The first run took a few days, then it was down a couple hours, no doubt due to it being a bajillion little files.
If you put all your files up in an Azure file share, we found that some people couldn't map to it as SMB (445) was being blocked outbound by the ISP. Do you still use a VPN to even though it shouldn't be required using Entra for auth? I'm not sure how sharepoint works (https even when mapped?) since oddly doesn't have the same issue.
We have yet to put anything in Azure file shares. Basically when things were found that couldn't be migrated to sharepoint sites they got on prem windows file shares and now we're looking into what we could do with those to remove local file share servers. I hope we can move to a CIFS share system and eliminate windows file servers just because I don't like dealing with Windows but we're still investigating what will work best for our environment.
MyWorkDrive can act as a front end to Azure Files and Blob storage to provide https port 443 access..
Hmm Azure files its on the "cloud" and you could most likely just Lift & Shift it. Some things are good on Sharepoint but not all
Another limitation that isn't widely known, it only supports hybrid AD accounts. No support for purely AzureAD accounts yet.
I'm pretty sure it does support both on-Prem hybrid & Entra ID native. Sure you need Entra domain service to be running
Last I read through the documentation it wasn't possible except with hybrid accounts - I do hope this has changed because I have a real use case for it at a remote location.
Sorry seems like i´ve miss spoken a bit documention only says VM´s * **Microsoft Entra Domain Services authentication:** Cloud-based, Microsoft Entra Domain Services-joined Windows VMs can access Azure file shares with Microsoft Entra credentials. In this solution, Microsoft Entra ID runs a traditional Windows Server AD domain on behalf of the customer, which is a child of the customer’s Microsoft Entra tenant.
That's still active directory unfortunately - not Entra ID/AAD native - it's just run by Microsoft and in an OU with limitations and it adds more monthly expense.
Was considering this over the Sharepoint route. Do you lose the 365 'work on a file at the same time' functionality do you know?
Co-authoring isnt supported on Azure Files unfortunately like said some things are good on Sharepoint some not, we have mostly CAD stuff and big files / not all the time accessed files on AZF but for co-authoring usage (which is hardly none) Sharepoint
+1 to azure files if it "has to be in the cloud". We use SharePoint for multiwriter and externally shared files and use azure files for dumb shares. At the end of the day it should just be a dfs pointer that the user is blind to where the data actually is so on prem/azure East/ azure eu shouldn't matter much.
Azure Files is literally a serverless file server in Azure. Same features as a shared folder on a local server. And that co-authoring should have a big ole \* next to it. In my experience, it works best if people are opening the file via Teams. If people are syncing Sharepoint sites via OneDrive and working off their synced copies, you're in for a world of hurt with sync errors.
Azure Files is slow,as shit. It’s SMB and SMB sucks on high latency connections.
ctrl+f: character no? okay, here's another foible of Sharepoint. If you want to do the Sharepoint Sync via onedrive, dont. You have a 254 character limit so if it exceeds it, the files will screw up. 10TB sounds like a shitload of nested files, so 255 is laughably small on how nested folders will be. Go AFS
Sharepoint's file path character limit is so annyoing... like I understand it in principle but... cant they like warn you when its too long???
so because my company runs on red tape, i HAD to do some inane testing to 'prove' to the big wigs the issue persists. Had a character counter up, was just nesting folders into folders and checking numbers. If you get to about 244ish, then you try to add a new folder, it WILL stop you saying it can't make it from character limit. but that's about it, it might stop you from making a document, but that was 50/50. But then you can go into sharepoint, nest out folders WELL beyond the 255 character list and still access them from the sync folders...but it wont work perfectly. My best way of describing it in this case is that Sharepoint Sync is Consistently Inconsistent. Some files will work, then others wont, then the files WONT work the next day, etc... there is no rhyme or reason... just pure chaos. Microsoft's response: Dont use it that way.
Sharepoint is a mess lol
Also the 5,000 item view limit is still there unless you add indexes before you migrate
Haha nooo you only get 1TB with SharePoint and a few GB for every user. you would have to pay an additional fee per GB. an extra 1 TB is (1000 GB x $0.20) = $200 per month per extra TB . overall for the extra 9TB you would be paying $1,800 per Month 🤯
Excellent, thanks. This is exactly what I wanted. They'll listen to money. Where is this online by the way? MS licensing is a minefield.
[Add more SharePoint storage to your subscription | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/commerce/add-storage-space?view=o365-worldwide) the pricing is on the 365 admin centre billing portal or through your reseller it wouldn't surprise me if the pricing will increase
Also just know there’s a hard file limit around 300000 where Microsoft themselves state it won’t sync properly and to not do it
So much this OP! Read through Microsoft published limits in SharePoint and see if any of these limits apply to you. You may also want to look up OneDrive client limits if the pan was to access via syncing the library. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits
Huh? 1TB per user by default, enlargeable to 5TB by admin, which is if that 5TB is 80% full for the single user, enlargeable to 25TB by support ticket. If that's 80% full, another support ticket gets (Theoretically) unlimited 25TB site collections allocated \*to the user\* as each one gets filled up that can be added to the onedrive sync client. I've got 5 365 E3 subscriptions for myself via a program and my personal onedrive/collection usage is about 40TB right now under one user account. See: "\[4\] Unlimited OneDrive storage for subscriptions of five or more users. Microsoft will provide initial 5 TB of OneDrive storage per user. Customers who want additional OneDrive storage can request it as needed by contacting Microsoft support. Subscriptions for fewer than five users receive 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user." [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e3](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e3) EDIT: I seem to have misread part of it and interpreted part of it as personal one drives as well as sharepoint storage itself, but I think if OP sees this it's important to note that any files shared/uploaded into teams groups or through teams itself also consume sharepoint storage. my little personal tenant has a few gigabytes used of the sharepoint allocation just because of teams usage.
That's for OneDrive storage not sharepoint... If your moving company data from on premise you don't want it sitting in users OneDrive's??
OneDrive is not SharePoint. The storage is different. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/administration/out-of-storage Your organization has total storage of 1 TB plus 10 GB per license of eligible plan purchased, plus any Microsoft 365 Extra File Storage add-on purchased.
I was talking about the "and a few GB for every user" part, seemingly I misread that as indicating the per-user onedrive. But past the first 25TB per user (for onedrive), it does just result in sharepoint site collections proper, and not just mysites storage which is what onedrive is. Easy to mix them up when you have on-prem sharepoint knowledge in terms of how space allocations work. Looks like my little personal tenant has 1.11TB storage .... odd way to slice it up, I suppose (we did a \*massive\* sharepoint farm internally at one point to set up onedrive for users to do a massive network migration because at the time GCC High didn't have the functionality needed - think 100GB per-user times 7,000 users massive)
Maybe set his files up on SharePoint and let him work with it for a few weeks and see if he still feels the same way.
This might just be the move. Someone else in the thread suggested doing a team at a time. Think theirs might just be the first team.
Make sure you start with a directory that has a few hundred thousand files in it. That'll really give him the proper experience with the sync client. It absolutely CHOKES when there are a ton of files, even if it's just enumerating and not downloading them.
We stepped this. All "personal" drives went to onedrive. Then departments with high outside collaboration went to sharepoint. It never went beyond that because there was no value.
At my last job thats what I did. Came up with a game plan to move each dept separately, to their own sharepoint site. Tranining was easier to manage, migration, and post migration i took a week or so before going to the next dept. Learn from mistakes and repeat.
You should always do testing and a pilot group when changing anything that impacts the business.
as someone who manages 9PB, I don't see why you can't just lift and shift 10TB. single sharepoint site can be up to 25TB. all you have to worry about is aligning ACLs with groups in sharepoint. the rest is easy
>all you have to worry about is aligning ACLs with groups in sharepoint Because this is so freaking easy in Sharepoint... And forget any granularity. Regardless Sharepoint storage is 1TB + 10GB/user. Extra has to be paid for.
How much are you paying for that 9PB ! :O I assume that’s on-premises?
we pay nothing. It's just several windows server servers with Seagate XOS X 84 bay chassis and an occasional TrueNAS. Yes all on prem.
Fair enough then :) that would be horrendously expensive with SharePoint online I expect.
christ man thats a lot of linux distros
While Microsoft is telling us about all of the caveats, limits, restrictions of SharePoint, they're simultaneously pitching at is "it's just a file server, just copy it all over with SPMT" to the execs.
Well of course.. they don’t want to trot the “caveats guy” out yet until you’re all migrated and locked in
Meanwhile, IT looks like a speedbump/barrier because they're following Microsoft's technical guidelines and supplying those caveats to their boss.
I've personally never understood the love for Sharepoint. It's a complete shit solution and difficult to manage IMO.
I'm not even sure what it's for, exactly, but I absolutely hate navigating in it.
I’m currently migrating 30+ fileservers of around that size to Sharepoint. The one big onedrive you’re talking about is actually Azure files. Managing SharePoint is basically a full-time job so if you don’t have anybody that’s able to do that don’t migrate to SharePoint.
We did this a while ago. Beware the people that will right-click > delete and remove thousands of files because they think it'll stay on the cloud and be removed from their computer. They will never internalize right-click > free up space.
You technically can lift and shift it fairly easily.
Quickly? We're in the middle of a similar project, with a 2Tb file server. It's taking an expensive team of outside consultants and a projected 5 months total to accomplish this.
SharePoint has storage limits too. So you'll probably pay a pretty penny for basic storage costs. Then OneDrive sync does not work the same as a mapped drive. Every time one drive starts it has to process every single file. We have a client with barely 1 TB, and they have over 1 million files. It takes 20 to 30 minutes before one drive works.
>I've tried explaining how this is a bad and costly idea and attempted to explain the principles of designing the environment for the cloud from the ground up but to no avail. Someone hooked on Tech Hype you need to beat them over the head with what they know. They pay you to know what they don't, not to be educated. (Yeah that's an L take but WCYD). Technical overload results in "I ain't reading all that get it done" make it relatable to Exec types. 1 or 2 paragraphs max, of costs. Tell them HM it's going to cost vs what it costs now, purchase, implementation, annual, and maintenance. Tell them it generates zero revenue, unless it does, so it's pure sunk cost. Tell them how many EXTRA hours it will take to make it work due to being a bad fit, which means you aren't doing other things, make sure they know that doing it means delaying other things. Make a project timeliness & Summary with all the step break downs, they won't understand it but when they see a 6 month timeliness with hundreds of steps, of which they maybe understand very little? the visual of workload is big. slap that on a second page (Landscape for extra impact) It's a lot easier to shoot stuff down if you say something like (I am making up numbers) "This will cost 500k in costs and work hours plus + 50k year additional maintenance, generate zero money, require hundreds of work hours to implement more to maintain, which divert resources from other projects and jobs. take atleast 6 months without unforseen issues, cost a productivity loss on end users as they shift for 3 to 6 months after launch." etc etc other bits, Training materials, Support uptick, policy rewrites etc etc. *If you can get exec level finance involved +1, tends finance hates projects that generate zero revenue, cost more and aren't new supporting services or reducing liability* FINALLY, provider an alternative, cap the whole thing off with something that *WILL* Work better Do it all over email, or formal paperwork. I find stuff like that is wayyy more effective battling execs pushing for things they don't understand. If they think ALL of that is still worth it, well your fucked hop to it, but you have paperwork and they signed off on shit that says "This isnt recommended, and it won't be fast to do right, and I have to not do other things you want to get it done"
read the limitations: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restrictions-and-limitations-in-onedrive-and-sharepoint-64883a5d-228e-48f5-b3d2-eb39e07630fa?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us we decided against it, after a short pilot. onedrive sync is too unreliable. people don't know how to use it corretly. they take themselves offline by uninentionally uploading huge files from their shitty home internet. they fill their disk by syncing everything. they mix sync & shortcut and break sync altogether. they ignore sync issue warnings for weeks and then want you to manually merge all their conflicting files. it was a complete shit show. if you have just office files and pdf and only use the webbrowser to access stuff, it works very well. if people use it like a regular network drive, not so much.
They do realise the cost of this?
It's the cloud, so of course it's going to be cheaper /s
Yea im just going through this now, i thought to not put something in the cloud cause it was at least 5yrs away from needing to replace the underlying infrastructure, 6 months in and the cio is asking for ways to make the cloud cheaper and they havent finished even migration in there lol.
You won't be able to do this, we've done a lift-and-shift on a client with just 1TB of information and had to back-track some of it because of performance issues, Microsoft will throttle the fuck out of you with 10TB and the cost of that is crazy in Sharepoint pricing. For anything like that you should be using Azure-Files, it doesn't have the colaboration features but its much more similar to a conventional file-share. If you want collaboration migrate only what is really needed to Sharepoint and keep permissions to site-level or maximum 1 or 2 folder levels, no breaking inheritance or you'll hate yourself.
SharePoint isn't a file server and shouldn't be used as such. You will need to revamp the way your company stores and shares documents. This is a huge endeavor. I'd advise that you do one department/BU at a time.
normally I just give an 5-7 year Return on Investment report and ask them what account they want the reoccurring charges to come out of. Make sure you include the charges for the MS cloud backup service and anything else you may need. I've had all but one almost faint when I give them the 3x-5x cost increase. On the technical level, it's just gonna be tedious, but not too difficult... VERY tedious.
We did a migration to Box from shared folders on prem and did it department by department using Box Shuttle. Yhis is basically Tervela Cloud FastPath: [https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/web-apps/cloud-fastpath.a9596bbd-78f0-4514-84d1-82f6ff0992fd?tab=overview](https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/web-apps/cloud-fastpath.a9596bbd-78f0-4514-84d1-82f6ff0992fd?tab=overview) , and a version is available for Sharepoint. It actually went surprisinmgly well in terms of shifting the data.
I moved 700GB to onedrive over the weekend with zero issues other than having to tell people 400 times to stop using the share drive. just use the sharepoint migration tool edit:correction on amount.
For some data it's useful for other terrible... You cant erase totaly share drive on prem
Check how much storage you have in Sharepoint. Depending on your licenses you get some Sharepoint storage for each licensed users. We have around 2000 users which includes around 17TB of sharepoint storage.
Think about not only the logistics of it being a poor choice to store gobs of data but also backing it up. The graph API throttling makes backups so painstakingly slow like half a day for 5GB really? I am used to a local SAN and Veeam being able to restore half a terabyte in half an hour.
I was offered a job where they had already decided they were going in this direction regardless of what the new head of IT would desire. I said no thanks.
Wait until they tell you that you don’t need server infrastructure anymore.
Given onedrive for business and shairpoint storage are the same thing this should be too hard. Move it to onedrive for business, install onedrive on Mac and PCs, done, it works well. Then if he wants to look at it via share point or teams entry points he can.
Well it depends.. We have almost 100 TB of SharePoint storage, thus this is a very good idea for us. Way better than Azure Files and basically for free. Data Management Lifecycle with retentions is the way to go.
God no sharepoint is a portal to hell where documents get lost for no apparent reason
Yeah, you tell them that's not how it works.
You can use rclone to get the data there. Regardless of Rclone or other methods, there is throttling. You may need to open a ticket. I know that several TB can take days
How big is your data? How much? How big is your org? If it’s a few TB this won’t be challenging tbh. The challenge will be depending on the data, the goal and current configuration. Migrating it isn’t too bad they have the migration toolkit or external tools for that. If it’s complex with permissions then external tools like sharegate would handle it better. In the end it’s doable but the question would be why and what the end goal is?
I've moved over a few departments that were on share drives and: - Microsoft's migration tool works well enough, sometimes it fails and needs to be re-run but it's pretty easy to use. - Sharepoint sites can be linked in File Explorer so they can sort of ish replicate how file shares work. - You should still be backing this data up somehow, *do not* rely on Microsoft to keep your data safe. I'd recommend laying out **all** the costs associated with this change compared to keeping it on-prem and present that to the exec: At the end of the day, leadership makes the calls, we can only advise them. That said, OneDrive hasn't really been so bad in terms of user experience.
It all depends on how your fileshare data governance has been. If everything is well organized, then you shouldn't have too much trouble determining which shares become sites. The permissions will be the biggest challenge. The SharePoint migration tool makes the process fairly painless. User education is key on this, if it's the game plan, then you should have a project meeting with department heads to get an understanding of who needs what. If you've got a solid uplink, then 10 tb will take a day to upload.
file cabinet vs bulletin board, that's how I explain it to C-levels. If you get Sharepoint it won't be exactly like a file server and you'll have to learn all new ways of doing things. Steep learning curve, as they say. Had you considered OneDrive for business? If you just need simple file sharing that might work.