Migrating a large Dropbox account to Onedrive

I recently migrated my ~ 1TB Dropbox account (single user paid plan) to Microsoft OneDrive (consumer version). Here's my "lessons learned".

• I prepaid for Microsoft Office 365 Home for several years with discounted gift cards bought during a Black Friday sale. It turns out you can prepay Office 365 Home for a maximum of 4 years. When you try to redeem more gift cards you'll receive an error that you need to wait at least 1 year before you can redeem the next gift card. (I believe the gift cards have no specific expiration date, but am not entirely sure).

• The easiest way to migrate data from Dropbox to OneDrive (consumer) is to use Microsoft's https://mover.io service. Mover was a data cloud migration startup that Microsoft bought a couple of years ago and integrated their tech into its Enterprise offerings. For consumers who want to migrate their data from another cloud storage to OneDrive (consumer) Microsoft still operates the original mover.io service - and it's free. (More info in the Microsoft docs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/transfer-files-to-your-personal-onedrive-with-the-mover-transfer-wizard-7dbda93c-71e6-483f-8914-ad445554cd31)

• you can login on mover.io with your Microsoft (consumer) login and connect your Dropbox account as source and your OneDrive account as destination, pick a source and target folder (i.e. the root folder on both sides) and start a data transfer job.

• the data transfer runs on the mover.io servers (not via your laptop and your own Internet connection). In my case it took around 14 hours to transfer ~ 1 TB data. In the end you get access to a detailed log that can be filtered for skipped and error'ed files.

• in my case I had a number of files that hadn't been copied due to these problems:

  • file too large (OneDrive only allows files up to 10 GB. I had some ISOs, VM images, etc that were larger)
  • empty files. (unlike Dropbox, OneDrive doesn't support 0 byte files. In my case I had hundreds of .gitkeep, __init__.py, etc files. Fixing these was a manual process (i.e. I put in comments or dummy content).
  • path too long (OneDrive doesn't support long paths)

• mover.io also seems to support other cloud storage providers as source like Google Drive, Box and other OneDrive accounts. (However, I haven't tried connecting them).

That's it. Happy migrating!