This view cannot be displayed because the number of items exceeds the list view threshold defined in your Central Administration

Symptoms

When attempting to load the items from a list or library, the ShareGate migration tool displays the following error: 

This view cannot be displayed because the number of items exceeds the list view threshold defined in your Central Administration. You might need to set indexes on columns with which your view is filtered to be able to load this view.

Error code

Any error code ending with: -120

Details

When the ShareGate migration tool loads your SharePoint items in a migration window it uses a Built-in view in the view selection dropdown by default.

The view selection drop-down allows you to use your own SharePoint views to filter and organize your content in a migration context.

In SharePoint the default list view threshold limits the number of items in a view to 5000 items.

You can modify the limit in the central administration of an on-premises version of SharePoint, but you cannot modify this limit in Microsoft 365.

You get this error when your selected view surpasses the item limit count of your environment.

The error can also happen with a view that reveals less items than the list view threshold with a filter on a column that is not indexed.

This is because SharePoint would have to load all the items in your list to determine which items should be filtered in that view.

There are a few things you can do to work around this error:

1. In the ShareGate migration tool, select the Built-In view in the view selection drop-down at the top-right of your items in the copy screen. This view is a special view created by the ShareGate migration tool and it is designed to load any number of items, regardless of the List View Threshold. This will allow you to copy your items with all their metadata even if the number of items in the list exceeds the List View Threshold.
2. If the problem originates from a view that has a filter on a column that is not indexed (as per the example above with the Modified column), indexing the column will allow you to load the items with the selected view. Indexing the column can be done by going in the list's settings in your browser, then clicking on Indexed Columns and finally clicking on Create a new index.
3. If you are using Copy If Newer (Incremental copy mode), you should attempt to run a Copy Content migration for the specific library only, and apply a time range filter to manually set the time parameter to only copy files from the source that were created or modified since the date of your last migration (if you have this information accessible). Copy Content will allow the ShareGate migration tool to copy the content of the list instead of merging it, so the app will not try to make any changes to the indexing, allowing you to avoid the error.
4. Increasing the value of the List View Threshold in the SharePoint Central Administration can also solve the issue (up to the new specified value). However, this solution is not recommended because it can lead to performance issues on your SharePoint server.