Moving Documents with Version History

Steve,

Since nobody answered, let me try answering your question.

I do not think there is any metrics around whether it would be feasible to do what you want to do with thousands of documents. You might need to set up a pilot with some performance counters on SharePoint and also on the servers themselves and watch the service performance, and the load on CPU etc.,

In my opinion, you might want to look into a more migration focused product than nintex, like ShareGate ​. ShareGate is pretty nifty tool and I have used it successfully for migrations. They also support powershell, so you could just schedule the migration for a specific time each month.

Hope that helps!

Hi, Mathieu -

Sorry I didn't respond to this earlier - the mail notification ended up in my junk mail, and I just saw it yesterday.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I was not looking for a purchased third party solution for this - I was hoping I could use some feature of Nintex Workflow to do this, but I'm not certain that I can rely on what I have found so far.

To complete this thread, what I ended up doing was writing a PowerShell script to move the documents from the source library to the target library.  The script uses a CAML query to identify the candidate items, and the workflow history is preserved when the files are moved.  The script is then scheduled to run periodically.  The disadvantage is that I needed to introduce a server based component into the solution (the PS script), but it seems to do the job, and I believe this is reliable.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this post.

Hi, Rego - I have included the relevant parts of the script here.  There is more to the script that is outside the scope of the issue, but this should do it.  I needed to maintain the folder structure in the target list, so this may be more complicated than you need.  The most important line is the last one - the "File.MoveTo" statement.  It looks like the formatting got lost when I pasted the code , so the indenting is gone.  Hopefully this is enough for you to make it work.  Good luck!

# Get the Source and Target lists

$SourceList = $Web.Lists["Reconciliation Docs"]

$TargetList = $Web.Lists["Archived Docs"]

# Get all items where Status = Approved and Approved Date less than Archive Threshold Date

$CAMLQuery = "<Where><And><Eq><FieldRef Name='GLStatus' /><Value Type='Choice'>Approved</Value></Eq><Lt><FieldRef Name='GLApprovedDate' /><Value Type='DateTime' IncludeTimeValue='TRUE'>$ThresholdDateStr</Value></Lt></And></Where>"

$SPQuery = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery

$SPQuery.ViewAttributes = "Scope='Recursive'" # Needed to include folders in the library

$SPQuery.Query = $CAMLQuery

$SourceItems = $SourceList.GetItems($SPQuery)

# Move each file to the destination folder

foreach ($SourceItem in $SourceItems) {

# Get the Source File

$SourceFile = $Web.GetFile($SourceItem.File.URL)

# Try to get the Target Folder

$TargetFolderName = $SourceItem.File.ParentFolder -replace $SourceList.RootFolder, $TargetList.RootFolder

$TargetFolder = $TargetList.ParentWeb.GetFolder($TargetFolderName);

# If the Target Folder doesn't exist, create it recursively as deep as needed

if ($TargetFolder.Exists -eq $false) {

$TargetFolderNameArr = $TargetFolderName.Split("/")

$FolderPath = $TargetList.ParentWebURL

foreach ($SubFolder in $TargetFolderNameArr) {

$FolderPosition = $FolderPath

$FolderPath = $FolderPath + "/" + $SubFolder

$TargetFolder = $TargetList.ParentWeb.GetFolder($FolderPath);

if ($TargetFolder.Exists -eq $false) {

$TargetFolder = $TargetList.Folders.Add($FolderPosition, [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFileSystemObjectType]::Folder, $SubFolder)

$TargetFolder.Update()

}

}

}

# Move the Source File to the Target List - "MoveTo" retains Version History

$SourceFile.MoveTo($TargetFolder.Url + "/" + $SourceFile.name)

}

Hi Steve

Any Ideas.

I have tried using a UNC Path and full url to the destination library still no luck.