Bulk File Transfers for Virtual M&A Data Rooms

Bulk File Transfers for Virtual M&A Data Rooms

CUSTOM SOLUTION FOR BULK FILE TRANSFER

One of the biggest challenges that M&A companies have with virtual data rooms is to upload and download large collections of documents. idrShare has custom built and embedded into each client’s virtual data room site several custom developed functions that assist with this process.

All Files broken into Small Chunks for Faster Secure Upload and Download

VIRTUAL DATA ROOM M&A TYPICALLY USE TREE DIRECTORY FOLDER

When companies or asset and divestiture advisors want to share data on an oil and gas asset package or on a company for sale, they are keenly interested in organizing the data in an easy-to-find taxonomy. Since most business users are familiar with the hierarchical tree directory structure found on their desktops, energy data rooms are usually populated with the same tree directory structure. Typical parent folders might contain folders and subfolder and documents all under these headings; Geology, Logs, Financial, Seismic, Reserves, Land, Agreements, Management, etc. Once this data collection is organized on the site administrator’s desktop, the challenge is then to transfer a copy of the large document collection into the third party hosted secure webs site or virtual data room. These data rooms can often include hundreds of folders and subfolders, and 2,000 plus documents requiring about 10GB to 15 GB of hard disk space.

MANY FACTORS CAN SLOW DOWN, DISRUPT OR TERMINATE FILE TRANSFER

During the bulk upload or download process, there are many factors that can either slow down, disrupt or even terminate the uploading process. idrShare offers four different methods of bulk data transfers; Microsoft SharePoint Windows Explorer “drag and drop”, Zip Upload and Bulk Upload Download in the browser or windows version. Users are encouraged to select the method that works best in their network environment. This article will review the Bulk Transfer method.

CUSTOM BULK TRANSFER OF SMALL CHUNKS

The idrShare Bulk Transfer solution is coded to first review the data collection to identify any special characters in the folder or document names.  Browser blocked characters are replaced by another synonymous character that will enable the upload. This custom upload feature also previews the data collection to determine if the file path of the upload is too long. File paths that exceed 256 characters can be blocked during the upload process. This automated pre upload audit provides the site administrator with a report of any potential issues as well as list of file or folder names that are changed. Once any preliminary changes are made to “clean and prep” the data, the bulk upload process starts. What is unique is that each file or document is broken down into small 100kb chunks and then reassembled on the target server after uploading through the network.

Bulk Upload Transfer Status

This strategy of breaking up the content into smaller pieces allows the upload or download to avoid the issues often encountered with attempting to upload large files. Transfer rates can range from 1GB to 3 GB per hour. The idrShare system is also set to allow files of up to 2GB in size to get transferred.

With these custom bulk upload and download tools, energy investment banks and advisors can now upload an entire data room in one day or several hours enabling them to “get to market” as soon as possible. The idrShare data room offers these same types of bulk transfer process to prospective investors for downloading the entire data room document collection from the website to their desktop as well. A speedy process helps facilitate the data sharing and hopefully, a successful transaction for all of the parties.

About the Author

Mickey Henry is the owner of www.idrshare.com or idrShare, LLC and supports investment banks, advisory firms and corporations by building and hosting customer designed virtual data rooms. Mr. Henry has over 15 years’ experience in providing data rooms and provides passionate support to his clients.