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Move Your Data Stored in OneDrive

Whether you are joining or leaving Cornell, or you want to transfer your OneDrive data to another individual, group or storage service, here are some suggestions to move files in the Microsoft cloud-based environment.

This article applies to: OneDrive

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Transfer OneDrive Data to Another Person or Group

The simplest method to copy your OneDrive data to one or many others is to create a team in Teams. Add each person who needs access as a member of the team. Then move the files to the new team. Multiple teams may be needed if different datasets should be shared with different groups.

  • Be sure to move the files to the new team to maintain version history. If you copy the files to the new team, only the most recent version is copied.
  • Previous collaborators will lose access to shared data unless they are added to the team.

Copy Data to a Personal OneDrive Account

Students are eligible to copy their Cornell data to a personal account. Microsoft provides the Mover tool to copy your Cornell data to a Personal OneDrive account. Transfer files to your personal OneDrive with the Mover Transfer Wizard will get you started.

Other affiliations may be eligible to make a copy of your account, but it requires approval from your supervisor. Students may also require approval if they worked for a lab or department while they were at Cornell, since they may have data that requires special handling.

Transfer To A Different Storage Service

If you want to move from OneDrive storage to another service (for example Box, Box Departmental Folders, Google Drive, or Dropbox) you will need to copy the data to the other service. Once you copy over the files, you can delete the content in OneDrive. 

Some additional things to consider:

  • Copying generally preserves the folder structure of the content but it won’t transfer the collaborators, shared links, comments, metadata, or the file history. It will only copy the most recent version of the files.
  • You could sync all files using the OneDrive sync client to your local computer then copy them to your destination. This could consume a lot of space depending on how many files you have.
  • A free graphical tool that can connect to multiple cloud services is CyberDuck. You can connect this tool to OneDrive and your chosen service, then copy files directly from one to another -- no local storage is required. This tool is not supported by CIT.
  • Any tool that uses your personal computer to download and then upload data might not be suitable if you have a slow or unreliable network connection.  

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