Frs-staging folder - where?

[acl03]

I am new to DFS/FRS and I just set up one of our remote offices' file servers to Replicate to a central NAS for disaster recovery. Seems to be working great. I did the following:

Set up a DFS Root.
Added the source and destination shares as targets
Turned on two-way replication

My question is: Where is the proper place to put the Frs-staging folder? There is 1 folder on each remote office that I want to mirror to the NAS:

D:\Office1

The nas is set up with a folder for each office as follows:

S:\Backups\Office1
S:\Backups\Office2
S:\Backups\Office3
...
S:\Backups\Office9

For my first Root, I set the FRS-Staging folders to be:
D:\frs-staging (source)
S:\frs-staging (target)

Is this ok? Is it ok to put 8 more roots pointing to s:\ for it's frs-staging folder? Any other comments on my setup?







Thanks,
Andrew

 

[force5]

I may be missing something Andrew, but I never did anything with the frs-staging folders. I thought these frs-staging folders were simply "temporary" folders that DFS uses while the replication is taking place for the first time. I think all that was handled automatically when I set up the DFS root. Maybe it has something to do with our share set ups being different. Did your shares already exist on both the source and the target with data already in place, or did you have the source data in place and then created the target so the data could replicate to a newly created share?. The only portion of your post that looks familiar to me is the part:
"Set up a DFS Root.
Added the source and destination shares as targets
Turned on two-way replication".
If I remember correctly, That is all I did, but it has been a couple of years since I implemented this.

thx

Thanks,

Chad
Network Administrator

 

[acl03]

I'm not exactly sure what frs-staging is used for. It is some sort of temporarily holding queue i imagine.

When i first set up DFS, it asks where where i want that folder to reside on either side. This is the same screen where you select an initial master to do the first replication.



Thanks,
Andrew

 

[force5]

I used the book "Windows Server 2003" by Mark Minasi as reference. He used a scenario with a fake company to walk you though the steps, which was very helpful. I am positive that I chose the defaults. If it does indeed force you to enter a location to save it to, I would put it on the same drive as the source. That is where mine ended up. I eventually deleted that frs_staging folder after the replication was finished. I would check your own environment to make sure before you delete yours.
Have you run into any permissions issues? The first DFS share I created boogered up all the permissions on all the files and folders? I never did figure out why. I fixed all of that! The 2nd DFS share was created the exact same way but had NO problems.

Good Luck.

Chad

Thanks,

Chad
Network Administrator