Migrating data for an organization is often a challenge that arises only once you’ve decided where you are migrating to. The solutions in the market aren’t designed to be simple, easy, cost-effective or potentially the idea to search for a solution doesn’t come to mind — hence why people default to using the native sync (computer software) agent. But this will likely cause more headaches than it solves and can cause a number of problems, as it's not designed for large-scale data migrations.
There are four reasons we'll touch up on about why using the sync agent for data migrations is a bad idea. It's a simple sync agent, it's reliant on your computer hardware and infrastructure, it can't handle discrepancies in bulk, and has a lack of reporting.
A sync agent is not designed to handle large amounts of data, it’s designed to partially update files or every now and then upload an entire file. The majority of files are megabytes in size and often don’t stray into the 100s of GBs. For most migrations, it's more important to handle hundreds and thousands of files rather than a single big file.
Unlike compute infrastructure that can scale both by adding more servers or by being backed by large internet backbones, your own computer is going to be limited in resources which will already be used by other processes (like running your base operating system or using Chrome).
But also, if you have 1TB of data the chance of you being able to sync this down to your device to then upload would require you to have a 2+TB hard drive. If you don't already have such a hard drive on hand, this could be an extra expense you might only need for this single project.
If migrating large amounts of files or data between two (or the same) cloud platform it won’t be able to transform the files (i.e. export Google Doc formatted files) or deal with sanitization (removing characters that aren’t supported in the likes of SharePoint or Egnyte) like a cloud migration platform can.
If attempting to migrate thousands or millions of files having comprehensive reporting is key, this way you understand what is happening with each file every stage of the process. If you’re using the native sync agent it basically tells you that it’s attempting to sync ‘x’ files and at times can be stuck on a file without you having any knowledge.
Also once the sync has completed there is no final report to provide insights as to what made it across and what didn’t. For large migrations, you could have hundreds or thousands of files that didn't transfer successfully and not know it.
Using a cloud migration tool such as Movebot may add additional cost to your migration project, however with the importance and cost of data to a business, ensuring your data has been migrated across without corruption or data loss is paramount to a modern data operation. Having the ability to see what is happening and to be able to confirm everything has happened when it should have must be integral to any organization migrating its data.
Not to mention using a SOC2-compliant migration platform not only reduces your underlying infrastructure cost, but it ensures everything happens at lightning-fast speeds as solutions like this are backed by large data center resources.
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