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kockiren
Asked: 2011-02-25 08:58:23 +0800 CST

Realtime File Replication with Windows Server

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I am researching alternative solutions for real-time-file-replication on windows Server OS. Now we use XO Soft WAN Sync for file-replication but in the next time we want to expand our Server-location and so we search for a alternative System for replication. Anyone has experience with real-time replication?

SAN is not possible because the System should be closed. So if the Network is down each node must still working with the replicated files. Any suggestions?

windows windows-server-2008 replication realtime

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Distributed File System (Microsoft)

    DFS Replication

    Early versions of DFS used FRS which provides basic file replication capability between servers. FRS identifies changed or new files, and copies the latest version of the entire file to all servers.

    Windows Server 2003 R2 introduced "DFS Replication" (DFSR) which improves on FRS by only copying those parts of files which have changed (remote differential compression), by using data compression to reduce network traffic, and by allowing administrators flexible configuration options for limiting network traffic with a customizable schedule.

    IBM General Parallel File System

    The General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a high-performance shared-disk clustered file system developed by IBM. It is used by many of the supercomputers that populate the Top 500 List of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. For example, GPFS is the filesystem of the ASC Purple Supercomputer which is composed of more than 12,000 processors and has 2 petabytes of total disk storage spanning more than 11,000 disks.

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  2. DFS seems like a good option.

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  3. Terminology so badly wrong here, the replication times does not equal to latency time! Screenshot below shows the schedule to configure replication times on Win2k8r2.

    Picture shows where to configure the replication time

    Latency on the other hand between sites, really depends on bandwidth, QOS, type of connection and various other items put together.

    One massive downside to DFS, there is no file locking mechanism (lets hope they sort this out soon)!

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  4. The already mentioned Mirrorfolder allows real time syncing of (open) files and real time mirroring of open files and (system) partitions (and periodic syncing, syncing at certain system events). Syncing of whole files or forward syncing of only changed blocks is possible, and setting of bandwidth use, filters. I`m using it on Win 7 Pro and Win 10 Pro since some years for mirroring running VMs locally and into my LAN (available for: "Windows 10 / 8.x / 7 / Vista", "Server 2016 / 2012 / 2008", "Both 32-bit and x64 editions"). SyncbackPro is my traditional tool for real time syncing of (opened) files, but it cannot sync changed blocks. Syncovery should do both. All 3 are low cost solutions.

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  5. I use MirrorFolder (http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/) for this task. Its very stable, rediculously cheap and has a large number of options and modes. I've used it successfully on every version of Windows from 2000 to Win7 and on Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

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