Copy Or Move Documents Within SharePoint Online

SharePoint is widely used for its content management capability. We generally start by creating a Document library to store the related documents. Over time everyone starts creating new documents in SharePoint or uploading the content. The lifecycle of the document does not end here. As time passes, we like to have the documents logically placed together. The need of copying or moving the documents to other document libraries, sites or even other site collections then arises.

The documents cannot be downloaded to the local drive and moved to other places as the metadata associated with the documents will get lost. The metadata includes creational information about the document as created by, created date, etc. Also, metadata includes any field information attached to the document inside SharePoint.

There are numerous ways to copy or move documents within SharePoint.

1. Content and Structure
   It is very much limited in functionality and offers moving or copying the content within the site collection. It's available to users with at least Contribute permission. This option only works with publishing features enabled sites.
   
   
2. Open with Explorer
   It is almost the same as copying documents from the local drive and losing out on Metadata and version history. Works with classic SharePoint and requires 32 bit Internet Explorer.
   
   
3. Third party tools
   There are a variety of third party tools available in the market for content migration in SharePoint. Examples are Sharegate, Metalogix, AvePoint and many other. They perform excellently, but they are paid.

Microsoft has recently made available the Copy to and Move to options to seamlessly copy or move the documents within the SharePoint tenant. That means the document can be copied or moved within the site, within a site collection, to other site collections, or even to the Modern Teams site.

Point 1 - Available on Modern experience only

Please note this option is only available on Modern experience and works with documents only and is not available for list items.

Using this option we can copy or move:

1. A single document
2. Multiple documents
3. A folder with multiple documents in it

Point 2 - Available with Document, Pages, Picture and Assets library

There are some limitations while moving or copying as below,