How to Plan a 15TB Migration from NAS to Azure Files
The complete pre-migration planning guide: assessment checklist, share inventory worksheet, bandwidth calculator, tool decision tree, share mapping design, wave plan, and a full project timeline — illustrated step by step, ready to adapt to your environment.
By Francis Avorgbedor | Azure Engineer · July 12, 2026 · 19 min read · Azure Files · Migration Planning · NAS
FA
Francis Avorgbedor
Azure Engineer · SEVENAI · Azure Field Notes
8
Planning steps before the first byte moves
2wks
Minimum planning phase for a 15TB migration
<5%
Of cloud migrations complete on time without a structured readiness process
100%
Of serious problems that are discoverable before migration starts
A15TB NAS-to-Azure-Files migration is a six-week project with a two-hour cutover window at the end. Of those six weeks, the first two are pure planning — no Azure portal, no Terraform, no RoboCopy. Every hour spent in the planning phase eliminates two hours of rework in the execution phase. Fewer than 5% of cloud migrations complete on time and on budget without a structured readiness process. The other 95% all share the same root cause: they moved fast and assessed slow. This guide is the planning framework that changes those odds. Every section is a deliverable — something you produce, review, and sign off on before the next section begins. Do not treat it as a reading list. Treat it as a project plan.
The 8-step planning framework — what you will produce before touching Azure
Figure 1 — Planning framework: 8 deliverables, 2 weeks, before any Azure work begins
All 8 planning steps must be complete before Phase 3 (infrastructure provisioning) begins — this is the sequence, not a menu
1
Week 1 · Days 1–2 · First deliverable
Source inventory: build the complete picture of what you are moving
You cannot plan a migration without knowing exactly what you are migrating. The inventory is not a check-the-box exercise — it is the primary input for every subsequent planning decision. Share size determines upload timeline. File count determines AFS scale limits. Access frequency determines storage tier. ACL complexity determines SID remap effort. If any of these numbers is wrong, the downstream estimate is wrong.
Use Azure Migrate's automated appliance if the environment supports it — it captures sizes, file counts, and access patterns agentlessly and classifies each share as Ready, Conditionally Ready, or Not Ready for Azure Files in hours. If Azure Migrate is not available, run the PowerShell inventory below on each share from a domain-joined Windows machine that has read access to the NAS.
Figure 2 — Share inventory worksheet: fill this in before any other planning work
2
Week 1 · Day 2 · Run in parallel with inventory
Compatibility audit: find the problems before migration starts
Azure Files enforces stricter naming rules than most NAS filesystems. Files that exist happily on QNAP will be silently skipped during Azure File Sync upload if they contain illegal characters, exceed maximum path length, or use Windows-reserved names. Find and fix these on day two — not on day 22 of your upload phase.
Figure 3 — Compatibility audit: four scans to run on day two
Run on day 2 — scan all shares for Azure Files compatibility issues# Scan 1: Find all files with illegal Azure Files characters Get-ChildItem -Path "\\NAS\Finance" -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Where-Object { $_.Name -match '[:\*\?<>\|\\"]' } | Select-Object FullName, Name | Export-Csv "illegal-chars-Finance.csv" -NoTypeInformation
# Scan 3: Check if NAS is domain-joined (determines SID remap requirement)# Run from the QNAP admin panel: Control Panel → Domain Controller# If "Not joined": budget full SID remap before AFS upload
3
Week 1 · Day 3 · 2 hours of measurement
Bandwidth calculator: know your actual upload speed before estimating timeline
Do not estimate upload timeline from your WAN line capacity. Measure actual available throughput at business hours, factor the client's traffic shaping policy, and calculate daily transfer capacity. Every migration timeline that has slipped did so because someone used the line capacity specification instead of the measured business-hours throughput.
Figure 4 — Bandwidth calculator: from measurement to migration timeline
Rule of thumb: if raw calculation exceeds 20 days, seriously evaluate Azure Data Box to eliminate WAN as the bottleneck for bulk transfer
4
Week 1 · Day 4 · Critical for non-domain-joined NAS
SID remap assessment: if the NAS is not domain-joined, plan for this carefully
Most QNAP deployments are not domain-joined. They use local QNAP users mapped to Active Directory through a proprietary LDAP bridge. This means every file's ACL references a QNAP-local SID that Azure Files cannot resolve. The remap must happen on a Windows Server intermediate before uploading to Azure. The effort scales with file count and ACL complexity — not share count.
Figure 5 — SID remap effort estimator: calculate before committing to a project timeline
5
Week 2 · Day 1 · One decision, documented with rationale
Tool selection: match the tool to the requirement, not the other way round
The correct migration tool depends on four factors: whether you need ongoing hybrid sync after migration, your network bandwidth relative to data volume, your source type (SMB vs NFS), and whether you want a managed service or a scripted command-line approach. The decision flowchart below maps these factors to the correct tool — and requires a one-paragraph written rationale so the decision does not get revisited later when someone on the team has a different opinion.
Figure 6 — Tool selection decision flowchart: follow the path for your environment
6
Week 2 · Day 2 · The design that drives Terraform
Share mapping design: produce the table that drives every infrastructure decision
The share mapping table is the most important planning document in the project. It maps every source share to an Azure file share, assigns a storage tier, assigns a storage account, and documents the 1:1 or grouping decision. Every Terraform resource, every AFS sync group, and every storage account that gets provisioned comes from this table. Do not provision anything without it.
Figure 7 — Share mapping design: source share to Azure target with storage account assignment
Active shares with many users must have dedicated storage accounts — pooling active shares causes shared IOPS contention. Archives and low-activity shares can be pooled safely.
7
Week 2 · Day 3 · Sequence matters more than speed
Wave plan: migrate low-risk data first, learn from it, then migrate what matters most
A wave plan sequences your shares in order of increasing risk and criticality. Wave 1 migrates archives and read-only data — lowest risk, maximum learning. Wave 2 adds medium-complexity active shares. Wave 3 is Finance and HR — your highest-stakes data, migrated last with full confidence from two successful waves behind you. Each wave has explicit go/no-go criteria before the next wave begins.
Figure 8 — Migration wave plan: three waves with go/no-go gates between each
8
Week 2 · Days 4–5 · The signed-off project plan
Project timeline: the week-by-week plan that everyone signs before work begins
Every stakeholder — IT manager, project sponsor, department heads whose shares are being migrated — signs off on this timeline before infrastructure provisioning begins. The timeline includes all planning outputs, all execution phases, the cutover window, the validation period, and the QNAP decommission date. Changes to the timeline after sign-off require a formal change request — this prevents the scope creep that extends most migration projects by 30–50%.
Figure 9 — Project timeline: 6-week Gantt from planning through decommission
The planning phase (Weeks 1–2) must be complete before any infrastructure provisioning begins. Do not compress it to hit an arbitrary start date.
"The planning phase is not overhead. It is the migration. The execution phase is just following the plan. Teams that skip planning do not save time — they spend it on rework instead."
— Francis Avorgbedor | Azure Field Notes, July 2026
Planning checklist — print and complete before touching Azure
Share inventory complete — every share has: size (GB), file count, last write frequency, unique ACL entry count, Azure Migrate readiness status
Illegal filename scan complete — results exported to CSV, remediation actions identified and assigned for all flagged files
Path length scan complete — any paths >2,048 characters identified and restructuring plan documented
NAS domain-joined status confirmed — if NOT domain-joined: SID remap timeline calculated, user mapping table drafted, icacls script tested on sample directory
Bandwidth measured at business hours — actual upload Mbps recorded at 9am, 12pm, and 3pm; QoS/traffic shaping policy documented; daily GB transfer calculated; timeline confirmed
Tool selection documented with rationale — written decision (not just a tool name) explaining why the chosen tool is correct for this environment's requirements
Wave plan agreed — three waves defined, go/no-go criteria written for each gate, wave 3 cutover window confirmed with business stakeholders
Project timeline signed off — all stakeholders have reviewed and approved the timeline, change request process agreed, rollback plan documented (QNAP read-only retention period)
✓ The planning investment pays in execution certainty
Two weeks of planning for a six-week project sounds like an excessive proportion. It is not. Every item on the checklist above represents a problem that will be discovered during execution if it is not discovered during planning — and problems discovered during execution cost more time and create more risk than problems found during planning. The share inventory drives the Terraform. The compatibility scan prevents Day 22 surprises. The bandwidth measurement prevents schedule renegotiation. The SID remap estimate prevents weekend overruns. The wave plan prevents your most critical shares from being migrated with an untested process.
Run the planning. Complete the checklist. Then build the infrastructure. In that order, every time.
Get the Azure field notes — every week
Planning guides, architecture decisions, real field lessons. Written by Francis Avorgbedor.
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