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Best tool to copy volumes between servers?

Hi,

We need to move one of our volumes to another server. I am thinking of robocopy. Volumes consists live users' home folders. What I Amy do: I will start copying or mirroring data by using robocopy. Once copy has been done, I will announce the down time, stop the sharing, and copy the incremental data.

Is this doable or sounds good? If there is any other better procedure or tool for above mentioned task, please suggest.

By our OS is Windows 2008 R2 and it's a SAN volume.

Stelian Stan

That's a really solid tool. You can also use richcopy. This tool works the same as robocopy except it has some improvements such as multithreading the copies. When copying lots of files/folders this should be faster than robocopy.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx

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edster9999

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browningit

I am a robocopy fan as well - it can be a little slow as mentioned with long path names but it has yet to fail me for the same type of project you are describing. For days that I want a UI, I use Teracopy.

Cheers,

Naj Saqi

ASKER

So for my project, are following parameters good to go?

robocopy source destination /mir /z /copyall /dcopy:T /MT /r:3 /w:15 /log+:<Path> /tee

So, I will run this command on destination server, will it slow down the source as well?

Stelian Stan

To mirror the file from source server to destiantion:

robocopy source destination /COPYALL /B /SEC /MIR /R:0 /W:0 /LOG:TestD.txt /NFL /NDL

You shouldn't notice any decrease in resources during the copy.

Naj Saqi

ASKER

Thanks.

By the way, what back up mode does? When we are using /copyall, is /sec necessary? If file and directory names will not be logged, what will be logged then?

What about /MT parameter? Will mutithreading makes job faster?

Naj Saqi

ASKER

Morevoer, I need to copy directory time stamps as well, should I use /dcopy:T?

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Stelian Stan

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Naj Saqi

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Lets suppose there is source folder called \\Server1\Share1" and destination folder is "\\server2\S"

At source, all home folders reside for example \\server1\share1\user.name1 or \\server1\share1\username2

Now I want to copy only folders starting with specific letter, lets say 'S'. I am trying to accomplish it with the following command:

for /f "tokens=*" %a in ('dir \\server1\share1\s* /ad /b') do robocopy %a "\\server2\s" /mir /zb /copyall /dcopy:T /MT /r:3 /w:15 /log+:c:\robocopylogs\Copy-ltr-S.txt /tee

Now what's happening, all folders are being copied under a folder instead of root at destination, i.e. all folders and subfolders (including files) starting with S are being copied at \\server2\s\home instead of \\server2\s\steve.mike or \\server2\s\susan.john ...

Please help in this regard.