DFSR Crisis - Need assistance

Here's the scenario:

One file server running 2008 R2. All user folders are on here, and we're using folder redirection to redirect desktop, documents, contacts, favourites, etc. We built two new servers running 2012 R2, and installed DFSR and DFSN. On one of these servers, we robocopied the whole of the users folder four days ago, This was for two reasons- to preserve a backup and to potentially pre-seed the replica.

On the other (nee) one, we created the name space and replication group. Data started replicating from the old file server, all looking good so far. Then, the (old) file server crashed and need to be rebooted. This interrupted replication, and the new server, which at this point contained partially seeded data, was removed from the group and re-added.

At this point all seemed to be going well, however a couple of days ago we got reports of, as you can guess, massive amounts of data being missing,. Now, I should state that I was contacted by the on-call technician (it's a 24 hour operation); I'm not the engineer that originally worked on this and my knowledge of DFS is sketchy at best. I did a bit of a review, and concluded that because the size of the cache was set to 8GB, the data would no longer be preserved in the conflict and deleted folder. Yeah, I probably should have checked, but it was 2am and I was half asleep.

So, I decided to rebuild it using the robocopied data, and whatever was in the nightly backups. This has so far been taking about 36 hours, and looked good until it halted this morning. So noe I've found two things;

1. It's run out of space, because the Conflict and Deleted folder does in fact seemed to have preserved the data. I know that with 2012R2 I can retrieve this. I'm now wondering if it's worth attaching this disk to a 2012R2 server (one of the new file servers) and doing the restore, then re-attaching it to the old file server.
2. Even the users with restored data are complaining that they don't see it. A quick check has revealed that permissions have not been preserved. As I t happens I have ascript I created a couple of years ago when we had a similar issue (we needed to copy back user data from somewhere else). So I can fix up the permissions with this script.

So my questions are as follows:

1. Anyone been in the same oat? Any guidance or insight would be useful.
2. Can anyone confirm whether if I go with option 1 the permissions will be preserved?
3. Now that I've started copying data back, what will happen now if the data I'm trying to restore form the conflict and deleted folder is already there?

Appreciate any feedback or suggestions.