The Great Migration: Moving 10,000 Files to Cloud Storage

I had 10,000 files on an old FTP server. They were disorganized, poorly named, and scattered across folders. Moving them to Google Cloud Storage seemed daunting. Then I discovered gsutil, the command-line tool for Cloud Storage. I wrote a script using gsutil cp with the -r flag. It uploaded everything. Then I used gsutil mv to reorganize. I used gsutil ls -l to see file sizes. I used gsutil lifecycle set to add automatic deletion rules for old files. The whole migration took a weekend. But the best part was using gsutil rsync to keep things in sync during the transition. No data lost. No downtime. If you have a migration ahead of you, learn gsutil. It's powerful, it's scriptable, and it's the tool that makes Cloud Storage feel like a local filesystem.