Here are a few useful tips if you’re looking for ways to move documents from their origin to a destination.
For small quantities of documents of the order of a few MB to GB, the easiest way is first to move the documents from their origin to one of your local disks, then from your local disk to the destination. In fact, most solutions offer drag & drop clients for these transfers.
| Solution | Client for transferring documents |
| Sharepoint | Use the https://dms.epfl.ch Web client directly |
| Google Drive | Install Google Drive client https://www.google.com/intl/fr_ch/drive/download/ |
| Switch Drive | Installer Switch Drive client https://help.switch.ch/drive/downloads/index.html |
| myNAS |
Install your NAS partition using a CIFS mount point on your computer. Alternatively, a range of WebDAV clients can be found at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV#Les_clients_WebDAV |
However, when it comes to transferring larger quantities of documents, the situation becomes more complicated, as transfer times can rapidly increase from several minutes to several hours or even days… and a connection failure during the operation will interrupt the transfer.
Google offers the possibility of exporting account backups using the Google Takeout tool. The contents of your account are first compressed into files with a maximum size of 50GB, which you can then retrieve one by one.
Another solution is to use the rclone tool (https://rclone.org) and its rclone sync command, the aim of which is to synchronize all documents from the origin to the destination. In the event of a connection failure, the command can then be restarted and will be able to continue synchronization without needing to start from scratch. It can synchronize Google Drive (https://rclone.org/drive/), Switch Drive (https://docs.s3it.uzh.ch/how-to_articles/how_to_access_external_storage_with_rclone/), s3.epfl.ch (https://scitas-doc.epfl.ch/advanced-guide/s3-buckets/), etc.