Migration Assessment Scan: Long OneDrive URLs

Learn how to fix issues with long OneDrive URLs during migration.

Overview

When you're moving a OneDrive site from your source to the target environment, the OneDrive URL changes formats. On the source platform, the OneDrive sites are in the format of https://onedrive.contoso.com/personal/domain_user. On the target platform, the Domain_User portion of the URL changes to use the UPN for the user. This looks similar to https://onedrive.contoso.com/personal/user_contoso_com.

Example:

If you used this file:

https://OneDrive.contoto.com/personal/contoso_bobsmith/Documents/Folder1/Folder2/ProjectA.docx

The directory name of the file would be:

Personal/contoso_bobsmith/Documents/Folder1/Folder2

After the migration, the file path will look like the following.

Personal/bobsmith_contoso_com/Documents/Folder1/Folder2

Notice the URL is now four characters longer than it was before. Depending on how the UPNs are formed at your company, the change in length may be larger.

If the previous file in the source environment was 255 characters, the length after migration would be 259 characters.

We have identified four different locations in which failures are likely to occur due to long URLs. As a result, we have four different reports concerning long URLs. The Scan Result Reports section covers each report along with the remediation that needs to occur.

Data Migration

The migration of the source content resulting in the long URLs fail. This causes migration jobs to fail, which will prolong the migration project unnecessarily.

Preparing for Migration

Review the reports and follow the remediation recommended for each report. In general, the remediation involves moving the content closer to the root of the site collection.

Post Migration

Validate that your content has been migrated.

Scan Result Reports

This scan results in four output files. Each file is for a specific long URL issue that will result in migration failures. LongODBUrl-AllDocs-detail.csv There are two limitations related to the length of the path to a given file:

• The server relative path to the folder containing the file has a maximum of 400 characters. Using the following example file:

  https://OneDrive.contoto.com/Personal/contoso_bobsmith/Documents/Folder1/Folder2/ProjectA.docx

  The directory name would be the following: Personal/contoso_bobsmith/Documents/Folder1/Folder2.

  After the migration, the file path will look like the following. Notice the URL is now longer than it was before: Personal/bobsmith_contoso_com/Documents/Folder1/Folder2.

• The server relative path to a file or folder has a total maximum of 400 characters. Using the following example file:

  https://OneDrive.contoto.com/Personal/contoso_bobsmith/Documents/Folder1/Folder2/ProjectA.docx

  The server relative path to the file looks similar to the following: Personal/contoso_bobsmith/Documents/Folder1/Folder2/ProjectA.docx

If there are files listed in this report, the owners need to move the files to shorter paths or delete the files. For example, they could move ProjectA.docx up to a folder directly under Documents, or they could delete the file if it's no longer needed.

LongODBUrl-NavNodes-detail.csv Navigation nodes have a URL length limitation of 260 characters. This can lead to the URL field exceeding the maximum length.

For example, you have a OneDrive site at https://OneDrive.contoso.com/personal/contoso_bobsmith. That site has a link in the Quick launch named Reports and the URL of the link points to https://onedrive.contoso.com/personal/contoso_bobsmith/documents/folder1/...folderN/Reports. During the migration, SharePoint updates the URL to point to /bobsmith_contoso_com/. The extra length added to the URL may result in the length being over 260 characters, which will cause the migration to fail.

To remediate this issue, you would move the reports folder close to the root of the /documents/ library and then update the quick launch link. Another option would be to remove the quick launch link.

LongODBUrl-Perms-detail.csv Permissions that are set on an object in SharePoint are tracked by the URL of that object. If you set permissions on a folder, SharePoint stores the relative path to the folder. If you set permissions on an item, SharePoint stores the server relative path to the item.

As a result, during a site migration, the URLs associated with permissions will be updated. This may lead to failures if the new URL is too long.

The remediation for this is to move the affected object closer to the root of the site collection. Another option is to remove the distinct permissions from the items in the report.

LongODBUrl-Deps-detail.csv Certain files can have other dependencies. Those dependencies are tracked by the URL. During the migration if the dependency information is too long, the migration fails.

There are two limitations in this report to be aware of:

• FullURL has a limit of 260 characters. This is the file with the dependencies. To remediate if the FullURL is too long, either remove the file or move the file to a location closer to the root of the site collection.

• DependencyDescription has a limit of 270 characters. This is the dependency associated with the FullURL. To remediate the DependencyDescription, either remove the dependency or move the dependency closer to the root of the site collection.