OneDrive or SharePoint? Decide Before You Migrate
Every migration into Microsoft 365 involves a decision that is easy to overlook. Does this content belong in a person's OneDrive, or in a shared SharePoint site?
Get that decision wrong and you can end up with business documents tied to an individual account, or private working files exposed to an entire team. It is a mistake that is surprisingly common in SME migrations because both destinations can look almost identical once they are synchronised to a desktop.
This is not specific to Liscaragh Migrate. Every migration tool, and every administrator carrying out a migration manually, has to answer this question for every folder being moved. It is far easier to make the right decision before the migration than to correct it afterwards.
They look more alike than they really are
OneDrive for Business uses SharePoint Online as its underlying storage platform. Technically they are closely related, which is why they behave so similarly. Both can store the same files, preserve the same folder structure and synchronise to Windows through the OneDrive client.
The important difference is not technical. It is ownership.
The question that matters
OneDrive is intended for one person's files. By default, only that user can access its contents until they choose to share them. It is the right place for personal working files, drafts and anything that does not need to be available to others.
A SharePoint site is designed for shared information. Access is normally managed through Microsoft 365 groups or Microsoft Teams, allowing everyone in the relevant team to work with the same documents without relying on individual sharing.
A simple question helps decide where content belongs.
If the person who owns this folder left tomorrow, would anyone else still need these files?
If the answer is yes, they belong in SharePoint.
If the answer is genuinely no, OneDrive is usually the right destination.
Shared business information should belong to the organisation rather than to an individual user account. SharePoint is designed around that principle.
Choose OneDrive or SharePoint, folder by folder
Liscaragh Migrate lets you map each source folder to a specific OneDrive account or SharePoint site and library, so the destination decision is applied exactly as intended, rather than defaulted by whichever account happened to run the migration. See choosing what to copy and where it lands in the full guide.
What goes wrong
The most common mistake is migrating shared folders into someone's OneDrive because their account happened to be used during the migration.
Everything appears fine at first. The owner can access the files and share them with colleagues. Months or years later that person changes role or leaves the organisation. Their manager may automatically receive temporary access if one is configured in Microsoft Entra ID, and the OneDrive is retained for a configurable period before deletion, but the wider team does not automatically regain access. Business information ends up depending on an offboarding process rather than living where the team expects to find it.
The opposite mistake is less common but just as real. Personal notes, drafts or working files are migrated into a shared SharePoint site because a single destination was chosen for the entire migration. Suddenly, documents intended for one person become visible to everyone with access to that site.
Neither outcome is ideal.
Fixing it later is possible, but expensive
Files can be moved between OneDrive and SharePoint after the migration.
The difficulty is everything connected to them.
Moving content changes its location, so existing links shared through Teams, email or other documents generally stop working because the file's address has changed. Permissions can often be preserved when moving content within Microsoft 365, but shared links usually cannot. Users need new links, bookmarks need updating, and confusion follows.
For a handful of files this is manageable.
For an entire department's document library it becomes a disruptive project that could have been avoided with a better decision before the migration started.
Before you migrate
- Classify each top level folder as either personal or shared before copying any data.
- Treat any folder used by more than one person as shared content and plan for it to be migrated into SharePoint.
- Decide your SharePoint sites and document libraries before the migration begins. Moving everything again afterwards creates unnecessary work.
- Where ownership is unclear, ask the person who uses the folder. They will usually know whether it is personal or whether the wider team depends on it.
Liscaragh Migrate lets you choose the destination, either a user's OneDrive or a specific SharePoint site and document library, for each migration project or folder. The decision still needs to be made deliberately. The software simply makes it straightforward to apply once that decision has been made.