1.2 million files off a dying file server in four weeks.
A 12-year-old on-prem file server was out of space and out of warranty — 1.2 million files, 15 years of duplicates and permissions nobody could explain. This is how a 200-person industrial distributor moved everything that mattered to SharePoint, with zero hours of business downtime.
Out of space, out of warranty — and out of excuses.
The server at the heart of this story was 12 years old, out of space and out of warranty. Free space had to be clawed back by hand before anyone could save a large project, and every odd noise from the server room raised the same unanswerable question: if this thing dies tomorrow, what exactly do we lose?
The content was its own problem. 1.2 million files carried 15 years of duplicates — copies of copies, "final" versions sitting next to "final-final" versions, and folders belonging to people who had left years ago that nobody dared to touch. There was no reliable way to tell which of it the business still needed and which was just weight.
Then there were the permissions. Access had been granted one request at a time, exception layered on exception, until nobody could explain who could see what — or why. Simply copying that structure into the cloud would have carried every one of those mysteries into the new environment. This migration had to fix the mess, not relocate it.
Inventory first. Migrate second. Cut over once.
A migration like this fails when you move first and think later. We did it in the opposite order: a full inventory and mapping, a hard decision about what deserved to move, and a cutover engineered so the business never noticed it happening.
Every share, folder tree and file on the server went into a complete inventory — so every decision that followed was made from evidence, not folklore about "what's probably in there."
We designed a new SharePoint library architecture and mapped each folder that would move to its exact destination — before a single file left the server.
The inventory showed 40% of the content was dead — duplicates and abandoned files. We archived it instead of migrating it, so the new environment started clean on day one.
The remaining content moved with ShareGate into the new library architecture — a controlled, logged, verifiable migration rather than a drag-and-drop gamble.
The unexplainable person-by-person permissions were replaced with group-based access — membership in a group, not a name buried in a folder's settings, now decides who sees what.
We cut over on a weekend: a final delta sync caught everything that had changed since the main migration, and the business opened on SharePoint — zero hours of downtime.
Three numbers tell the whole story.
Everything the business still needed made the move. The dead weight didn't. And nobody lost a working hour to the cutover.
The service behind this project — and two more like it.
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