Migrating Shared Dropbox to Shared Google Drive (for Work)

[latenitejazz]

Hi everyone,

New to this whole thing, so I'm looking for a bit of help (sorry if this is incorrectly flaired!).

I'm looking to migrate about ~14TB of data from Dropbox account to a shared Google Drive for work.

We've got a lot of digital assets (obviously), and many of them are constantly being updated/reused, so I'm looking to have as little downtime as possible while we do the changeover from Dropbox to Drive. I considered buying a NAS drive and doing a full download, reupload with it, but I was wondering if rclone would be able to achieve the same result without spending a shittonne of money.

Is this possible to do between shared accounts? I had a little look around but couldn't find anything that confirmed one way or the other for this specific use-case.

Thanks for your help!

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

This should be straight forward.

Here is a high level view

1. create a remote for the dropbox account - say dropbox:
2. create a remote for the shared google drive - say gdrive:
3. sync between them using something like rclone sync -v dropbox: gdrive:
   • try with --dry-run first to check it does what you want
   • add the -P flag if you want stats
   • experiment with --transfers to use more bandwidth
4. Do the sync for real - this is a presync
5. Declare some down time - set the dropbox to read only if you can
6. Do the sync again to copy any last minute changes
7. Declare the google drive open for business

The key takeaway is you can run rclone sync as many times as you want and it will only copy the changes over.

[Rohith_Agarwal]

Instead of buying a nas, rent a vps on hetzner or any other provider who has unlimited bandwidth. Just run the rclone sync command using screen. It will run in the background.

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

imho, best not to use a middle-man vm between dropbox and gdrive.
rent a cheap vm from google cloud compute, inbound:free

with hetzner, not unlimited - inbound:free outbound:20TiB free.
should be able to use their cheapest vm.
i use the second cheapest vm as a media server, run rclone mount and jellyfin.

for unlimited bandwidth, can use
https://black.host/unmetered-vps-hosting