The agency had been operating for seven years and had accumulated a significant library of tenancy agreements, inspection reports, compliance certificates, and correspondence, all stored on a repurposed Dell desktop PC sitting under someone's desk. The machine was running Windows 10 Home with file sharing enabled over the local network. There was no backup solution of any kind. When we ran an initial check on the drive, CrystalDiskInfo was reporting reallocated sectors and a caution status, the kind of thing that tends to precede a failure within weeks rather than months.

WHAT WE DID

The first priority was getting the data off that drive before anything else. We ran a full disk image using to an external drive brought to site and verified the image completed without errors, a safe fallback before we touched anything. The source data came to around 340GB across roughly 28,000 files with no folder structure to speak of. We reorganised it before migration, grouping by property address, then year, then document type and used the SharePoint Migration Tool to move it to SharePoint Online in overnight batches.

Microsoft 365 Backup was enabled for SharePoint and OneDrive, the first backup solution the agency had ever had. The whole migration completed in five working days.

SERVICES INVOLVED

• Microsoft 365 Migration
• SharePoint
• Managed Backup
• Email Security