Mounting OneDrive for Business as a volume so we can script a data migration

ndobric
New Contributor

Hi Everyone,

Wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions for a scenario imposed upon us. With no official OneDrive for Business sync client available for OS X, we've been tasked with trying to script our way into moving data from a networked drive to the users OneDrive folder. We currently are having our users access OneDrive through the web interface but can't figure out how to actually mount that location as a volume where we would then have some room to script.

Anyone else working on something like this?

9 REPLIES 9

bpavlov
Honored Contributor

Not sure if you're aware of this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45519

It's a preview, but it's better than nothing.

ndobric
New Contributor

Correct, I do have that running. Problem is, we can't use a beta/tech preview product as a deployed solution. Thanks though

mag
New Contributor

We're going to be migrating to OneDrive for Business and I've heard we've purchased this to migrate data: http://www.thinkscape.com/SharePoint-Online-File-Migration-Tool/
I'd check this out as well for reference: http://office365drivemap.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Office365DriveMap.ps1

bentoms
Release Candidate Programs Tester

@ndobric So you can't deploy a beta that fills the need but can a homebrew solution?

That seems kindof crazy to me.

Anyways, are the shares accessible over WebDAV?

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

I am going to actively follow this thread as we are looking to migrate to OneDrive for exclusive home folder use over the next year. Totally going to help us save on storage costs here.

Right now I have the OneDrive web interface as a primary option, the beta sync client (I agree...deploying this beta is not a good idea yet....it's somewhat glitchy) as a second and finally a somewhat hopeful, futuristic, off-the-wall solution.

Our Windows admins are telling me that one day they will be able to map a student/teacher's OneDrive as a home folder on the Windows side. Using the trusty profile tab in Active Directory, I am going to specify the user's home folder location and I hope the Mac's AD plugin will be able to use it. The likely problem I see is going to be the authentication methods used to mount the volume.

Doubt that will materialize in a year's time...am following both Microsoft's plans for OneDrive, Apple's plans to integrate with it (if any) and whatever folks on JAMFNation here manage to engineer for it. Thank you for posting any new developments.

blackholemac

ndobric
New Contributor

@bentoms It is crazy, a little(it is buggy) but I don't make the rules unfortunately. Regarding WebDAV, the share is a variant of WebDAV that I'm trying to determine. It's not a true WebDAV share. That would make my life easier if I could connect that way.

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

I have something to contribute to this discussion. I did find a good Mac product that seems to mount your OneDrive as a volume...sounds great almost except it's too salty pricewise and haven't done too much crash testing beyond connecting to a single test account in our environment. The cost is $49.95 per user!! I also worry it may be just a sync client masquerading as a volume.

Let's see if we can get some others on here to try the trial version and share experiences:
http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/

Hopefully other developers can do the same thing cheaper or with excellent EDU/K-12 pricing.

blackholemac

bpavlov
Honored Contributor

What if you just made that particular share available through something like SMB in addition to whatever sharing protocol its already using? I don't even want to think of what that would do to SharePoint (which if I'm not mistaken is what powers OneDrive for Business; very different monster from regular OneDrive), but hey it's a thought worth testing if the powers that be are so dead set on getting this working before Microsoft has official support for OneDrive for Business. Macs can mount AFP and SMB natively so either one should get the goal of mounting the share to work......

alliehwk
New Contributor

You should try SyncMate http://mac.eltima.com/sync-mac.html. It can mount cloud storages as additional disks, without duplicating files all over you hard drive. And it works with 1 TB OneDrive storage too.