Partly it depends upon the bandwidth available between the machines.
If the new servers have Gb connection and the old only 100Mb then one RoboCopy
and replication is the better way. 750GB over Gb is just a few hours. Over 100Mb
it is a day or more.
Also consider the data being changed while you copy. If the RoboCopy is going to
take several days to do 2 copies then you will need to consider the impact of
users changing the data (or shut down access for a long time). A single copy
will take half the time and once done the replication engine will look after
live changes that happen once the first copy is complete. You will still need to
user Robocopy on changes made during the first copy but that is much easier than
with two copies to worry about.
When I did this I first set up DFS link to the old and 2 new shares. I disabled
the new links to prevent access by users. Then used Robocopy to copy the data to
the first new server. Once Robocopy completed (there were quite a few errors
because some users had denied the Administrator access to some files) I set it
up to monitor the source folder for changes and copy them. As soon as Robocopy
settled down I enabled the DFS link to this copy and disabled the link to the
original server. It takes up to 30 minutes for all clients to notice (with the
default referral timeout). Then I set up the replication from the new copy to
the second new server and left it to it. Once replication was complete I enabled
the second link.
I was able to divide the data into several batches such as \\dfsroot\public,
\\dfsroot\home etc. so each batch could be done one at a time. This kept the
total data in a batch much smaller and let me work out the procedures on the
smaller batches before doing the larger ones.
One thing I did find was that if you have 2 DFS copies that are accessible to
the clients you must not use Quotas because you cannot control which copy is
accessed and eventually a quota will be exceeded and the replication engine will
break.
On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:50:05 -0700, Pavlos Gerardos <> wrote:
>Hello everybody,
>This is the first time i'm using DFS and i need some help with the
>initial setup...
>
>I need to move ~750GB of data (docs and images mainly, no databases
>or .pst files) from an old file server to 2 new file servers which will
>have DFS replication enabled.
>All 3 machines are located in a LAN. No inter-site replication is
>involved.
>What is the proper way to move the files?
>
>1.Should i copy the files through LAN from the old server to both new and
>then create a replication group?
>
>2.Should i copy the files through LAN from the old server to one of the
>new and then create a replication group where this will be the primary
>server and let him replicate to the other one?
>If that's the case, should i change the quota limits for the staging
>folder?
>
>3.Any other ideas?
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Pavlos
--
Dave Mills
There are 10 types of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.
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