Win2003Svr - MOVING network share to SAN w/o downtime 1

[CJarman]

We have a network share located on our DC. It's a large drive that hosts our users' documents, etc. However, the drive is filling up, so we want to *move* the files to our SAN. The permissions for each folder allows access by the user and Domain Admins *ONLY*. [Everyone group access has been removed.]
I am pretty sure we could copy the files over to the SAN, then use a script to point the user's to their new share. The problem is that most users do not log in/out each day. Do you have any other suggestions?

ENVIRONMENT:
Windows 2003 Server
AD Services
Mapped drive for docs, etc.
Hitachi SAN
Windows 2000 & Windows XP Pro Workstations

BTW, I tried simply moving my folder and one other users folder to the SAN. When I did, the user lost access to the files within. As a domain admin, I still had access. The permissions, etc were all screwed up, though.

I appreciate any help YOU can offer. THANKS!
CJarman

 

[itsp1965]

What you should do is to use something like scopy or robocopy (always worked with robocopy) to move the files from the existing folder to the SAN disk while maintaining file/folder security.
Before doing this, I would recommend you stop sharing of these folders (ideally after hours) and start your copy then.
Eventually they will need to logout/login again in order to refresh their settings.

Hope this helps.

 

[58sniper]

Yep - users should log out.

robocopy would certainly do the job, and copy the permissions if you wanted it. In fact, I'm moving a terabyte of data right now with robocopy (as I type this). Here is my favorite combination of switches:

robocopy.exe \\<source>\users e:\users /ZB /R:3 /W:2 /TEE /LOG:robocopy_users.txt /MIR /COPYATS

Run that while your users are online. It will copy over everything (except open files). When it's done, run it again, and will only copy new/changed files (again, except open files).

Then, once they're gone for the day, run it one last time to grab the new/changed stuff, and then kill the sharing on the source (to prevent anyone from getting to it if they don't logout/login). Update your login script. Have the users login. Presto!

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[CJarman]

So, I would use a command line like the following from the DC?

robocopy.exe \\DCSvrName\%username% J:\%username% /ZB /R:3 /W:2 /TEE /LOG:c:\temp\robocopy_users.txt /MIR /COPYATS

We use the J:\ drive for user docs... and their docs folder is named the same as their login name. Is this correct? I'll look up the specifics on the other switches, just to make sure they fit our environment.
THANKS!

 

[58sniper]

Well, I wouldn't do it that way if you're wanting to move all of the users. The %username% folder is probably inside of another folder, such as users or userdata. If you want to move all of the users, then you'd move the users\userdata folder.

You'd run this, of course, at the server. Not from a workstation.

Let's say you have a share, "userdata" on serverA, and you want to move it to serverB. From serverB, run

robocopy.exe \\serverA\userdata d:\userdata /ZB /R:3 /W:2 /TEE /LOG:c:\temp\robocopy_users.txt /MIR /COPYATS

The script will automatically create d:\userdata, and copy the contents of \\serverA\userdata to it, along with NTFS permissions.


Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[damjanster]

Have you thought about DFS?
Once the files would be copied (automatically) to the new location, you could just remove the original source share location and all users would be automatically relayed to the new location.

I think it would take some time to configure the shares to use DFS location, but it could eliminate downtime completelly.