Migrating files from one cloud to another can be a nightmare.

In a couple of weeks, I won’t be needing any of the Microsoft Office Suites anymore. I would have graduated and the chapter of my life as a student will officially end. 31 years of formal education (not going the intervening years that I started work, but I digress, you get the drift). So it doesn’t really make sense for me to continue subscribing to Microsoft Office anymore when I know I will never use it again. And if I need to use it sometime in the future, there is my work desk that comes installed with Office as well as open source versions of it. While not perfect, it’s not like I do not have absolute access to Office for critical tasks.

Office subscription comes with OneDrive, offering a generous 1TB of cloud storage space.  Over the years, I have added quite a lot of files inside, mainly photo backup and a number of videos. I have used about 200GB of space in all in OneDrive. Now, seeing that I am going to terminate the subscription, I need to find a way to migrate those files over. I have Dropbox that I use for work and the subscriptions, I usually claim the cost of the subscription through my company. It’s 1 TB as well but I have rarely utilized it since I start subscribing it for work. I have only used about 20GB of space, including share work files. So it doesn’t make sense for me to subscribe to two different cloud storage solutions, despite the fact that one is paid by the company. I might as well consolidate my personal and work files in one cloud storage provider. Consolidation is key. It makes life easier.

What doesn’t make life easier is the difficulty of having to download all my files to OneDrive, and then to re-upload them to DropBox. It’s just too tedious. Right now I am having difficulty downloading GBs of data at one time, only to be interrupted by connection issues with OneDrive.

Now I know that there are third-party cloud syncing solutions, but I have tried some of them, and almost all that I have tried were terrible unless you upgrade to their full suite of functionality to take advantage of their seamless cloud migration or cloud sync features.

My Office account is due in early December and I need to migrate 200GB of files fast and efficient. Right now, there is no other way than leaving my desktop on for days on end, crossing my fingers, hoping that the download is complete.

And it’s not that my connection is terrible, but OneDrive downstream speeds are terribly slow.