File migration readiness checklist

A storage report is not an inventory. These checks establish what actually exists.

• A read-only inventory of the estate exists.Content age, size, duplication, ownership, access and usage, captured without changing anything.
• The inventory covers every source in scope, including mailboxes, personal areas and forgotten shares.
• Volume is broken down by business area, not just totals.Totals hide the messy corners where migrations fail.
• Backups, archives and shadow copies are identified so scope is not double-counted.
• The inventory has a date and will be refreshed if planning drags on.

• Every in-scope area has a named owner who has confirmed what it is for.
• Areas whose owners have left are flagged for a decision, not silently inherited.
• Shared and cross-team areas have an agreed decision-maker.
• Owners have seen the inventory of their own areas and agreed it is right.Ownership on paper is not ownership until the owner has looked.

• Content is classified into plain categories: current, stale, duplicate, sensitive, unknown.Plain categories beat elaborate taxonomies. Five is usually enough.
• Stale and duplicate material is marked for archive or disposal with the owner's agreement.
• Sensitive and regulated content is identified, with retention requirements recorded.
• The unknown category is small enough to review by hand.If unknown is the biggest category, discovery is not finished.

The estate is load-bearing for more than documents.

• Load-bearing folders are identified: paths referenced by shortcuts, links, scripts and scheduled jobs.
• Applications that read from or write into the estate are known, with owners.
• Deliberate permissions are separated from historical accidents.
• Anything that breaks when a path changes has a plan, an owner and a test.

• The target structure is agreed and written down, not implied.Designed around how the organisation works today, not the old tree's accidents.
• Source to target mapping is explicit for every in-scope area.
• The exclusion list exists, with a reason recorded against every entry.The decision not to move something is still a decision. Record it.
• Naming, permission and sharing standards for the target are agreed before content lands.

• Sign-off points are booked with the people who own the risk.
• A pilot group is agreed, with success criteria that would be embarrassing to fudge.
• Each migration group has a rollback plan and a communication plan.
• Evidence is captured at every stage: what moved, what did not, and why.The evidence pack is what makes the migration defensible afterwards.

The checklist produces a picture, not a score. An unticked box is not a penalty point; where the gaps cluster tells you what kind of work remains.

• InventoryGaps here mean the estate is not yet known. That is discovery work still to do, not migration risk to accept.
• OwnershipGaps here mean decisions have no accountable owners yet, and every later stage will stall waiting for them.
• ClassificationGaps here mean scope is not controlled: nobody can yet say what moves, what archives and what goes.
• DependenciesGaps here mean the move can break systems outside the file estate, and nobody has agreed to that.
• Target and mappingGaps here mean tooling selection is premature. There is nothing agreed for a tool to execute yet.
• Sign-off and deliveryGaps here mean there is a proposed date but not yet an agreed decision.

A checklist with unresolved gates is not a failed migration. It is an honest description of the preparation still required.