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I'm about to take on a migration involving several large SharePoint Online sites, some with document libraries running into hundreds of thousands of files, and I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to approach this without the whole thing dragging on for weeks.
The obvious challenge with scale is throttling. Microsoft's API limits kick in hard once you're moving large volumes of data, and I've learned the hard way that pushing too aggressively just triggers longer wait times overall. Building in realistic time estimates based on actual throughput, rather than best-case assumptions, has made a huge difference in setting expectations with stakeholders.
Breaking the migration into logical batches rather than attempting everything in one massive run also helps a lot. It makes it easier to isolate errors, retry failed items without re-running the entire migration, and keep momentum without long periods where nothing seems to be progressing.
Incremental/delta migrations have been useful too, especially when content is still actively being used during the transition. Doing an initial bulk transfer followed by delta syncs closer to cutover reduces the amount of downtime users actually notice.
For efficiency at this scale, manual PowerShell scripting alone hasn't cut it for me. I've had much better results using the DRS Softech Tenant-to-Tenant Migration Tool, which handles batching, incremental syncs, and error retries more efficiently, along with clear progress tracking across large libraries.
The obvious challenge with scale is throttling. Microsoft's API limits kick in hard once you're moving large volumes of data, and I've learned the hard way that pushing too aggressively just triggers longer wait times overall. Building in realistic time estimates based on actual throughput, rather than best-case assumptions, has made a huge difference in setting expectations with stakeholders.
Breaking the migration into logical batches rather than attempting everything in one massive run also helps a lot. It makes it easier to isolate errors, retry failed items without re-running the entire migration, and keep momentum without long periods where nothing seems to be progressing.
Incremental/delta migrations have been useful too, especially when content is still actively being used during the transition. Doing an initial bulk transfer followed by delta syncs closer to cutover reduces the amount of downtime users actually notice.
For efficiency at this scale, manual PowerShell scripting alone hasn't cut it for me. I've had much better results using the DRS Softech Tenant-to-Tenant Migration Tool, which handles batching, incremental syncs, and error retries more efficiently, along with clear progress tracking across large libraries.