A ten-person professional-services firm held 508,000 files — around 6 TB of project archive — on a metered cloud service billing separately for storage, transactions and networking. Costs averaged $1,093 a month and swung between $586 and $2,307 on an archive that wasn't growing. When the firm came off the service, the archive spent five months on external hard drives with no redundancy. Buying storage hardware would have swapped an unpredictable bill for permanent maintenance duties, and reintroduced a fixed capacity ceiling.

We screened the archive for the conditions that break large migrations, then gated the move behind a real-user pilot across Windows and macOS. Out of 508,000 files, two exceeded the platform's size ceiling; we split and migrated both. The full archive moved in three weeks, at the quoted fee, while staff laptops moved between home and office.

Annual cost fell from about $13,100 to $4,000 including ongoing support. Every six months we reconcile their drives against the archive.