I'll say it upfront, I'm looking for confirmation that it's a good idea to move a client to the cloud. Now I'll make my case:

I recently took on a new client. It's a non-profit organization with an unusual structure. They have a small office in Maryland where a few people work, but the rest of the dozen employees are all remote, including the president who lives in the mid-west US.

The organization currently uses their server for a single thing: files. Each user has a shared drive and their own private user folder, accessed via remote desktop.

To be honest, the server is also handling user accounts, and is then synced through Azure to Office 365, which is what they use for all their email. So they're already in the cloud.

The client specifically requested moving their files to the cloud. They have a terrible internet connection in their office, making remote sessions very slow. They've also had repeated infections on this server (not sure what the previous IT folks were doing for security but it wasn't working).

It looks to me that Sharepoint in their Office 365 account would be the better option for these folks. What say you folks?

Also, I'm having trouble seeing much of a reason for these folks to have a domain at all, but that's probably my bias showing. These are all remote workers, they're all permitted to install whatever they want onto their company laptops, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to have this server in use at all anymore. As a non-profit I think they also want to minimize IT support costs and a server increases those.

Anyway, I'll accept your opinions, but I'm hoping you'll agree that the cloud is the best option. I just don't know if there's something I'm not thinking of.

I tried it. Hated it. Ok for editing MS documents in the cloud but offline/locally via OneDrive was terrible. Had lots of limitations like 5000 files here, 20000 files there which was a problem for us.

Basic test were ok but as soon as you put any stress on it, I had sync errors, it would permanently stop syncing etc. One of my simple tests is 10000 files in 100 folders of 1k each (all 0 bytes). It struggled to handle it.

Improvements have been made and I know they were working on bringing it all together as OneDrive Personal and OneDrive Business (or whatever terms they used) were completely different applications. The latter basically being an interface to Sharepoint.

So things may have changed in the past 12-18 months, but that was my basic experience.

Edit:
I tried a *lot* of cloud based file servers (Dropbox, Box etc). The biggest issue was most don't have folder/file level permissions so I couldn't have say a HR folder restricted to some people only. Ended up using Seafile on a homebrew VPS - it doesn't do the permissions either but we're small enough for now.

Thanks for your input, Christian! The concerns you raised were ones that I've been having too. I've seen that issue with the two different OneDrive versions, and it's a total confusing mess from a user's perspective. The end user has to notice that one entry for OneDrive looks just like the other entry but has their business name after it, which isn't always totally visible, and they have to know the difference.

I guess I also wasn't quite clear that the OneDrive for Business was Sharepoint. I thought that was just OneDrive associated with their Office 365 account, versus regular OneDrive which would be tied to the Microsoft account (another confusing difference). Are you certain about that? From my experience with that OneDrive for business, it only shows the user's files and not shared files. Would Sharepoint stuff show up in there too?

I guess I also haven't thought about how users will be accessing these Sharepoint files. I wouldn't mind a Dropbox-style syncing setup, but I hate to force all the users to devote that much storage space to their systems. Can folders download selectively?

It's surprising how little this has been solved. This is a company with a dozen people sharing around 210GB of files. This shouldn't be so difficult...

Also, I do wonder how much things have changed since you tried it, Christian. I guess Sharepoint 2016 has come out since then, and so far I've read that there's no longer a file size limit for one thing. I don't know about file counts or name lengths, though...

I'll have to stop reading about this for the night, though. I somehow ended up on a "Sharepoint for Dummies" page, which already felt a little ashamed of, and then I read the following sentence three times:


And now my brain is broken and I'm going to sleep.

One last thing. They did and didn't remove the 5K file limit in 2016:

Kill the domain, move them to Google Apps (*cough* G Suite) and don't look back. No servers to maintain and workstation problems can all be fixed with blast-off-and-nuke-it-from-orbit approach.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about doing, but I don't think they'll go for "G Suite" at this point. They already have their email handled anyway, and they get full Office apps with Office 365, which is still important for a lot of organizations.

Apparently MS just released a new sync client to replace the groove.exe client, and supposedly it handles syncing much better. Supposedly the Sharepoint 2016 service also removes the file limitations by indexing in the background differently, and the user doesn't have to worry about the number of files. But I'll be trying your test to see if that's true...

I need some assistance here. This client's previous tech support has neglected them, and the client desperately wants to move to the cloud, but I have to pull all their files off the server first.

The problem is that I'm not familiar with VMware servers. I can tell it's set up with at least two machines, one used exclusively for a file server.

All I'm trying to do is figure out how to make an attached USB drive show up in one of these machines so I can put the files onto it. Any pointers for how I do that? Where can I read up on this? Thanks!

You have to enable USB passthrough on the virtual machine's configuration, and (IIRC) restart the VM.

Thanks! I don't think I have enough information to access the configuration, though. Is that usually done at the server its self? All I see is what looks like a command line when I turn on the monitor...

Sounds like you are looking at vSphere ESX/ESXi and not VMware Server (long gone) or Workstation (runs on top of Windows or Linux). Given that you said servers and not server, I take that to mean a cluster of ESXi servers, which are typically managed by a vCenter Server (can be a virtual appliance, virtual machine, or physical machine).

Your next step would be to point the vSphere Client at the management IP (it is displayed on the command line screen) of the ESXi server.

Drop me a PM (or a DM on twitter @d_glynn), and I'll get on the phone with you, I play with this VMware stuff all the time

Thanks so much! I might be calling you tomorrow. I'll send you a message...

If they are just running the servers on ESX(i) then yes you'll just see the console of the hypervisor. You won't be able to access the VMs from there. Do you have a remote desktop connection to them?

You should be able to USB passthrough from the physical machine to the virtual machine. You'll still need the remote desktop part.

Otherwise Remote Desktop and copy to shared USB drive attached to another machine?

Or just use another client machine that accesses the file server files and copy them to your USB on the client machine?

Or just connect directly from the file server remote desktop to whatever you've chosen for your cloud service?

Few ways around this.

Thanks for the advise. A quick update: Phoenix42 and I chatted on the phone and he was a huge help. The server is running VMWare ESXi 5.5, and I can get to the console. The problem: the client's former IT company didn't give them THAT login. I can only guess that they decided to take a sneaky way of making themselves indispensable. Gross. Now they're claiming they don't know what that password is, and the tier 1 tech we talked to didn't understand that an external drive had to be added to the VM in question. I couldn't even explain that fact to him in a way he understood. I don't know this stuff and even I could grasp that concept as canuckInOR informed me.

Anyway, to answer your other questions: I can access two of their VMs via RDP. The admin one that runs Active Directory, and the file/print server.

I've finally resorted to transferring the files to another computer on the network like you and Phoenix42 suggested to me. It's really slow going, but it's working now. I was having trouble getting more than about 60KBps earlier, but now I'm up to around 9-11MBps on average. Not great for 400GB of data, but I'll see what I can do...

Don't have Gigabit Ethernet on both ends and switches in between? Sounds like you're maxing out 100Mbit.

Even if you had USB, it might only be USB 2.0 which usually maxes out around 30MBps.

It's only about 10-15 hours at 100Mbit speeds so not that bad really.

So did you end up settling on a cloud file sharing solution? I need to expand ours and would like user/group level access control which most solutions can't/won't do.

I did end up helping them move their files into a Sharepoint site. They were already using a few Shrepoint sites so they were familiar with how it worked.

What I wasn't familiar with was the miserable process of migrating the data to Sharepoint. My client has a T1 connection, so uploading using any server tools was out of the question. I had to remove the data and figure out how to upload 500GB of data to Sharepoint and OneDrive. The answer: SLOWLY. It was miserable. I tried using the OneDrive sync client, but even the most recent one failed completely. It uploaded 50GB in something like 12 hours which was totally fine, but then it slowed to a crawl and would upload 5 FILES every hour. So eventually I had to go through the web interface and drag and drop stuff. But this was fraught with difficulties. It would randomly fail, the browser would freeze, and I'd keep hitting the 256 character name limit. Just a mess. Also, I had to go through and bulk rename every file that had illegal characters in them ( #, $, % ).

This was a nightmare. I'm thinking of trying to upload the same files to Google Drive and see what happens.

Yeah that doesn't seem worth it even though we already hae Office 365 and therefore a subscription. MS' recommendation is to use Sharepoint for sharing between users and Onedrive for personal storage.

I'm looking at Dropbox but its permissions scheme is a bit wonky. Their version of a "team folder" gives everyone read access at a minimum and you can't override that with a "no access" permission for a group or anything. Also adding people to groups doesn't magically show folders that that group has access to.

I might be missing something, but this happened with me in Sharepoint too. It was maddening. In fact, even when I gave user permissions to a site, if I logged in as that user, I couldn't even SEARCH for the site. I had to use the actual site address and then star it as a favorite. Then it would show up on the user's Sharepoint main page.

Microsoft has been doing a lot of things right in recent years, but they still do a lot of stupid things.