Filename Sanitization and Normalization

Moving between different cloud storage platforms brings with it a bunch of challenges, the biggest one being around file and folder names. Different platforms allows different character sets and each have their own limitations, which need to be deal with. Movebot aims to make the process of Moving simple and comes with its own way of overcoming this problem.

Whats the issue?

Take a simple migration between Google Drive and OneDrive. Google Drive has very few limitations on filename conventions, whereas OneDrive has a strict set of rules that govern allowed characters in file and folder names. 

Example of Illegal Characters in OneDrive and Sharepoint

OneDrive prohibits the use of the following characters in filenames

*#><?\\|

And the following characters in folder names

#\/

Along with illegal characters, OneDrive has limitations on filename and folder name length and file size. All of these issues combined produce a challenge for migrating data and will normally result in hundreds of errors on a small migration, and thousands on a larger one. 

How Movebot can help?

During the Scan/Calculating stage of your migration, Movebot builds a report of potential issues and errors with your source data in relation to the destination storage engine. This report showcases the issues we expect to encounter, and in most cases how we can automatically fix them. 

Example potential issues view:

Most sanitization and normalization issues are fixed by enabling "Automatic Sanitization" when configuring the migration. This allows Movebot to automatically convert filenames into an acceptable format.

Example filename conversion:

Disabling Automatic Sanitization

In some cases, resolving Sanitization issues is something that you want to do yourself. You can switch of Automatic Sanitization when configuring your migration. You can then use the report of "Potential Issues" to identify files than need renaming and fix the issue before running the full migration.