It’s another exhausting day today. I spent almost whole day reading and figuring out how to effectively replicate our Data Center from good old Windows 2000 Server to a brand new and shining Windows 2003 R2 server.

In the morning when I went to work, I was very determined and I was sure that I will be using Windows Server 2003 R2 DFSR feature as a solution and it will be an easy day for me today.

The problem is, it only works perfectly when both the servers are in Windows 2003 R2, but in my case as I said the source server is a Windows 2000.

I tried many ways to make it work. I read almost all available resources, but no joy in the end. It works somehow when I’m using the old and Windows 2000 way of doing DFS replica, but it breaks in the end.

After trying almost all possible combinations of settings and even rebooting both the server tens of times, I decided to give up and find and some kind of hack_way to replicate not only the data but also all the security attributes and ACLs. I don’t want to simply copy it or restore from last night’s backup and re-apply again all the securities and worse in the end, all my users will complain that it is not updated, as those files are coming from yesterday’s snapshots. Really the best way is to find a way to replicate the data between the servers almost in real time as advertise by Windows 2003 R2 DFS. So that when I switch with the new server, users will not feel it or notice it.

I remember, Linux got something rsync command that can do the incremental copy, I’m sure with the advancement of Windows 2003 R2, they should have also similar utility.

Indeed, I found a utility called robocopy along with Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. I found it got some options that I can use for this purpose. I even created a simple script to automate and schedule the robocopy. It’s really pretty powerful!

Robocopy saves my day today.