File Migration from Netware 6.5 to Windows 2003/2008

Thanks for the advice, could you please briefly describe the advantages of Robocopy & XXCopy over normal windows copyying for my situation?
I read some info about XXCopy and can see afew things like flattening directory structures that could be handy but not necessary, do they just allow more start and forget type copying compared to windows copying?

There is about 350 home directories i would need to reapply permissions to so it's going to be time consuming if i need to do it manually, other file permissions can be reinstated by the sysadmin team after the handover.

I can't count the number of times a "normal windows copy" has crapped out on an open file or a read-only file or something else fickle.  Using a command line utility like XXCopy or RoboCopy seems to eliminate these "unknown" problems from cropping up during a large copy process.

Speed of copy plus avoiding what I've written above are my reasons for command line copy utilities.

Too bad you're not moving to an OES-Linux server with NSS volumes.  The Novell Server Consolidation Utility would copy all of the data and preserve all of the file rights and file attributes.

The file permission switch from trustee rights (NetWare/eDirectory) to share and file permissions (Windows) is something the Quest NDS Migrator does quite well.  With 350 user directories to deal with, you may want to look into its cost (somewhere between $20 and $30 per user account).  As mentioned before though, I don't like one-time use, throw-away utilities...it just depends upon how much manual work you want to do.  Quest, btw, will copy all of the data as it preserves the rights and changes them to permissions.

Scott

Just to chime in, we're in the same situation migrating from Netware to Windows.  It's a lot of work, but the file permissions are so a$$ backwards in Windows compared to Netware, it will drive you nuts.  Quest gets the job done, but not very cleanly in my opinion.  From our perspective, even with as many users as we have, we figure it's a rare opportunity to start with a clean slate and assign file permissions correctly from the start.  So we're just using the trustee.nlm to give us our spreadsheet of Netware file rights and manually assigning them appropriately in the Windows environment.  

Oh, and regarding the home directories, you don't need to assign a share for each user's home directory.  Assign a share on the "home" parent folder, then assign your NTFS permissions for each individual user on each sub-folder.  Still plenty of work, but it reduces it a bit.  Your login script looks like this:

net use h: \\server\home\%username%

rvthost, I'm glad you mentioned the share setup on "home" and not on each individual directory.  I wasn't sure about that point.

Scott