Migrating Forms and Responses to a New Team or Tenant
If you’re moving to a new Microsoft Teams team or migrating to a different Microsoft 365 tenant, you may want to transfer your existing Team Forms data rather than starting from scratch.
Team Forms includes an Export and Import feature that allows you to create a complete snapshot of your team as a .zipfile. While this feature is commonly used for creating local backups, it can also be used to migrate your forms into a new Team Forms environment.
What is included in an export?
Depending on the options you select during export, the backup can include:
All forms (or only selected forms)
Form responses
Uploaded file attachments
Views
Data source definitions (connections to SharePoint lists, Excel files, etc.)
Note: Only the data source definitions are exported. The underlying SharePoint lists, Excel files, or other data sources are not included in the backup.
Limitations
There are a few items that cannot be migrated automatically or require additional configuration after the import:
Public share links are not exported. These will need to be recreated in the new environment and will generate new URLs.
Workflows are not included in the export and must be recreated manually.
Data sources will continue to reference the original SharePoint lists or files after import. You’ll need to update each data source to point to the corresponding list or file in the new tenant.
Generated PDFs are copied exactly as they existed in the original environment. If a PDF contains links to uploaded files or SharePoint documents, those links will continue to point to the original SharePoint location.
Confidential responses (responses that are only visible to the original responder and team owners) will be migrated. However, because the original responder may not exist in the new tenant, these responses will instead become visible only to team owners after import.
Exporting your forms
To create an export:
Open the Team Settings for the team you want to migrate.
Select the Storage tab.
Click Export.
Choose which forms and responses you want to include.
Wait for the export to complete, then download the generated
.zipfile.
Importing into the new team
Once you’ve created your new team or tenant:
Open the Team Settings for the destination team.
Navigate to the Storage tab.
Click Import.
Select the
.zipfile that you exported previously.Follow the prompts to complete the import.
Re-importing a backup
The same backup can be imported multiple times if required.
During the import process, Team Forms lets you choose how to handle forms and responses that already exist in the destination team. For example, you can choose to:
Skip existing items
Replace existing items
This makes it safe to re-import a backup if an earlier migration was interrupted or if you need to migrate additional changes later.