ShareGate Migrate carries your associated permission levels during migration and will attempt to preserve their integrity from the source to the destination whenever possible.
This article explains what happens to your permissions when doing an Import from file share migration.
Note: When you migrate to a site associated with a Microsoft 365 group, the group's owners are automatically granted site collection admin permissions on that site. This means they can access everything on the site, including items with custom permission levels.
Index
Users and groups association
Your users and groups are automatically mapped at the destination. This association is done through the SharePoint people picker to preserve your permissions and Person or Group metadata values. For more information, see Users and groups association (automatic mapping).
Permissions on documents and folders
ShareGate Migrate will preserve permission levels on files and folders with custom permission levels at the source.
If your documents and folders do not have custom permission levels, they will inherit the permission levels from their parent in SharePoint.
If ShareGate Migrate finds custom permission levels on your items at the source, the items will migrate with broken inheritance (custom permission levels) at the destination, and all the permission levels will be preserved.
In some cases, items in your file share can inherit their permissions from different sources. When that happens, ShareGate Migrate will break the permission inheritance at the destination to copy the permissions from these different sources.
Note: Special permission levels are not supported. Only permissions with one of the standard access levels below are migrated:
Full Control
Contribute
Read & execute
Read
Write
Mapping permission levels allows you to replace the permission levels used at the source with a different one at the destination. To learn more, see Map permission levels.
How can I preserve my file share permissions?
The steps below will show you how to confirm the permissions in your file share and set them so they are migrated adequately in SharePoint:
Locate a file or folder where you need to preserve your permissions.
Right-click on the item.
Select Properties.
Select the Security Tab.
Click Advanced to open the Advanced options.
Confirm if all the permissions are inherited from the parent under the Inherited from column.
If they are, click on the Disable Inheritance button.
Note: Alternatively, you can add a custom permission to the item.
ShareGate Migrate will now migrate the permissions for that item.
Note: Under the Access column, any permission not using a standard permission level will be ignored during the migration.
Tip: Because the permissions between your file share and SharePoint are handled differently, arranging your file share permissions can benefit from some planning.
Microsoft does not recommend disabling the permission inheritance on many files and folders, and suggests grouping your permissions as much as possible.
A good approach is to disable the permissions in the migration options and manually add them at the library, site, or site collection level.