The Reason
Like many people, I started using Dropbox to store data in the cloud and sync data between different computers. Before getting a paid plan I invited people and got up to 5GB which was good at first. As my needs got bigger I had to upgrade to one of their paid plans in 2016. This plan cost £79.00 a year, it was called Dropbox Pro then and this changed to Dropbox Plus in 2018.
I was happy with this until I noticed that I don’t use Dropbox for more than storing and syncing files, I was later introduced to ResilioSync which does a better job of syncing files between my computers and it didn’t have multiple conflicts with .git files as Dropbox normally have. I am now paying for 2 services that are theoretically doing the same things and I was no longer making much use of Dropbox Paper.
I recently noticed that Microsoft has a great offering and as I have been thinking of migrating to Windows 10 from macOS, this was a good time to revisit my options. Microsoft offers the entire Office 365 (which includes OneDrive, which has 1TB of storage) for a cheaper price than Dropbox itself, I even went for the Office 365 plan that gives me an additional 6 seats for family members. This means 1TB of storage per family member.
Now, this wasn’t an easy decision to make, because I have more than 200GB of files in Dropbox and it was the day before my yearly subscription renewal that I decided to move away from Dropbox.
The Process
To move away from Dropbox to OneDrive, I needed to find out the best way of migrating my 200GB+ of files. This is a daunting task seeing that it was almost midnight at which my Dropbox yearly plan would renew. I quickly thought that I could just change my Dropbox yearly plan to a monthly plan instead and this would allow me more time to work out what to do.
Right after doing this, I started my search on migrating from Dropbox to OneDrive. There were various options and amongst them was a website called mover.io . A visit to the website made it clear that it was being acquired by Microsoft themselves, this boosted my confidence in this service, I mean the big MS came along and acquired it, this had to be a good service. I followed the signup process on their website and it allowed me to select the directories and files in my Dropbox I would like to sync, it then allowed me to select the path in OneDrive I would like the files to be saved to. Once I confirmed to start this process, it was now up to mover.io to sync the files and as this was a cloud service I didn’t have to have anything running on my computer. So it ran even when I was offline and when my computer was turned off.
Once the process has completed, an email will be sent from mover.io alerting you of how many files were successfully moved and how many had issues.
The Result
In my process, a total of 779,942 files were successfully moved and only 10 had issues.
I now have OneDrive running on all my computers and syncing between Windows 10 and macOS with ease. It was easy to get it set up using the Office 365 installer provided by Microsoft. By default, I have set up my OneDrive to keep all files online-only unless I request for it to be available on my computer.