This article focuses on the actual content migration effort which is seperate from planning, redesign, fixes, deployment, and configuration.

It's a very common question during the analysis phase of a SharePoint migration project. - How much time a "Tool or Migration API" will take to migrate the actual content from the source to the destination?

I found a couple proposals where people simply say 5GB per hour but it's not really practical.

It depends on multiple factors. I am not going to dive deep into how the below factors impact this. Just take the estimation based on content.
  • Network bandwidth
  • Type of content & file format i.e. List Item, Document, and Video etc.
  • Check In / out files & Versions
  • User base, Custom Permission & Groups
  • Workflow (OOTB, Design. Custom, Nintex)
  • Customization
  • Asp.Net Forms, InfoPath Forms
  • Threshold limit (Items, Lookup, Unique permission)
High-level content migration estimation view
List Item size is very low and associates with the large metadata, Workflows, Events etc.
  • Library item size quite big (files size like MBs) associated with versioning, large metadata, workflow, events etc.
  • File Share – No metadata, No Versioning
  • Video – Big size files.
How Migration API (Most of the tools use) works

How does version impact the estimation (which we usually miss)