Most of my file server installs these days seem to involve far too much downtime. The actual server install isn't too bad but migrating the data takes forever now that we have 1TB+ arrays we need to worry about. My typical method is to strip share permissions and use robocopy to copy all of the data over. Rather than wait for all of the data to copy over, I'd prefer to copy the data over the night before, then sync over changes after I strip permissions to the old server. Is there a nice way of doing this on Windows? I've looked into using DFS-R to accomplish this, but I'd prefer something a little...eh...smaller.
SnapOverflow
Couldn't you continue to use Robocopy and use some of the advanced file selection options? So over night you would basically
robocopy X:\*.* Y: /M. Then when you want to sync up, do the same thing. This should have the effect of copying all the files with the archive bit, and resetting the bit, then the next time it would copy anything that has it's archive bit set (and reset it again).Would a windows implementation of rsync like deltacopy be what your looking for ?
DFS-R. Works like a charm, without taking the server down. I never expose a server directly to users - all access is always done using DFS shares. actually my setups normally have 1-multiple DFS trees, most only one.