I have been involved lately in a number of migrations with one of our customers. This customer uses DocAve Migrator of AvePoint. It is a great product for enterprise migration and has a ton of options for handling almost any type of migration in any way. Using DocAve Migrator there are two major types of migrations, full migration and incremental migration. In principal a full migration migrates everything, while an incremental migration only migrates the differences. Incremental migrations are heavenly depending on the changelog of SharePoint and will only migrate the differences (except for deletes) as mentioned in those changelogs. You can imagine that a full migration will take a long time since it goes through each item and/or file. A incremental migration will only migrate the changes as specified in the changelog and is therefor fast. DocAve Migrator is also limited to the number of Gb’s you can migrate. This depends on the license you have bought from AvePoint.
Our case
We needed to migrate an already migrated part of content of an intranet. Our challenge existed of two parts. Firstly the amount of the content to be migrated was far more than our license still had available. Due to a lot of testing and remigrations we lost a reasonable amount of Gb’s for migration. Secondly the last migration was more days ago than the changelogs within SharePoint were kept.
Doing a full migration would fail since we didn’t had enough Gb’s left. An incremental would take only the differences of the changelogs. In our case it was 30 days. But the last migration of that content was more than 50 days ago. We would lose more than 20 days of changes in content.
Solution
We found a solution to use a full migration (which does not check the changelogs) to execute an incremental migration. It is a very simple trick but works great. The first thing you need to do is set a filter policy in DocAve Migrator. You will need to set the filter to take items and documents between the last migration and the one you are going to perform. The filter for items is needed for migrating items and will not migrate items containing documents (as in a document library). The filter for documents is needed for the files to be migrated.
The filter will look like as follow:
The rule specifies that you check if the modified time of the item and document is before and after a certain date. You will need to specify for item and document the rules separately. Secondly you need to select the filter policy into your profile settings. Select the filter policy here:
When you create a migration plan you need to specify which profile settings are used. Select the profile settings containing the filter policies. And you are all set to start the migration. Select the migration plan and execute it as a full migration.
It is important to understand that it does not check the changelogs when doing a full migration. It goes through each item, document or part of content you want to migrate and filters it based on the filter policies. Only content valid due to the filter policies is migrated. Because of it going through each item, document or part of content you will notice that it will take a heck of a time to perform the job. It’s like you are doing the migration of that content for the first time.
But when the migration is finished only the differences (as an incremental migration) are migrated. And far more important only the migrated content is removed from your Gb’s license. It’s a job worth waiting for.
