Share migration - easy way?

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Hey all,

I am thinking of migrating one of our main fileservers from 2003 R2 to a new virtual 2008 server running under HyperV and was wondering if anyone had or knows of a gem of a tool which will migrate all my shares (over 1000 of them).

Last time I setup some scripts myself to do it, but it took a long time in the preparation. I know there are tools out there to do this, but was looking for a recommendation from someone who has used one of them.

I have seen Robocopy mentioned but have never tried it. I was also looking into Secure Copy from Script Logic, but it looks like silly money considering I only really want to use it the once (Like £700 for 2 licenses).

 

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Modey,

I found this artilce http://forums.techarena.in/server-networking/922342.htm. Hope it helps you.

I never really done what you mentioned above... I used to xcopy to move files and folders across but never in the same volume as the amount of shares you have...

 

^^^ This

Robocopy rules - use the '/MIR' switch to mirror the contents of one share to another drive. I run all my backups using robocopy scripts with the /mir switch.

 

So will that do the shares as well Zeb?

 

be careful on how you use that, I have deleted files by mistake using that before. nothing vital just 15gb of the Manchester offices DR data

 

Hi

Would this Knowledge-base article help at all?

We had a similar situation whereby our users home areas were stored on one server, shared as \\servername\username, and we looked at this. In the end, after moving the files using ntbackup, we shared as \\servername\usergroup\username.

HTH

Maria

 

How did you manage that - the mirror switch simply mirrors data from one directory to the other - provided you're not doing anything daft like running it from the wrong side (i.e. FROM the new server TO the old server) I don't see how it can do any damage?

 

After playing with tools like Robocopy etc.. I decided to do it the manual way so I knew it would defo be sorted. Was quite straight forward really, since I had some partial scripts from a previous filseserver migration.

It consisted of using the DIR command with the /ad /b switches to get lists of users folders, then combining them in Excel using it's excellent string functions to create several batch files full of commands like this :-

net share 02abbottd$=e:\users\intake02\02abbottd /grant:everyone,full /unlimited /cache:documents

 

Use Robocopy like Zeb said or even RobocopyGUI if you don't like cli, the /mir switch owns

 

Just wanted to say that myself.

Here's a link to Robocopy GUI.

Look in the november section.

 

Has anyone tried RichCopy? looks intresting

 

Damn. Just found that too but you beat me to it again.

 

Sorry Nug

 

Errm, Maybe....