How to safely move a file share?

I have one Windows 2000 domain controller & file server, I am going to join a Server 2003 domain controller to the domain before I remove the old 2000 server out. How can I move all the file shares with the existing NTFS permissions from the old 2000 server to the new 2003 server with the least amount of manual work? A friend of mine heard of some software to do it but he wasnt too sure of it either. The server is not used for much more than file sharing but there are loads of shares setup and I dont want to manually set them all back up again if I can avoid it. In short I need a little help for a quick & smooth transfer. Any suggestions?

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Comments

dtlokee

If you use backup software it should preserve you NTFS permissions, then restore to the new server.

dynamik

Here's how permissions are handled when you copy or move files: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310316

It looks like the ntbackup (above post) or xcopy or robocopy (see kb article) will meet your needs. This will retain the permissions, but you will still need to manually share the folders on the new server. You would probably need a 3rd party utility to automatically recreate the shares.

sprkymrk

The way I usually do a file server migration is by using robocopy from the Resourse Kit Tools:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en

I set up the new file server, create the top level shares (if you have done it like me, there is only a very few actual shares like "Home" or "Files"). Then run robocopy with these switches:

robocopy \\OriginalServer\share\ D:\NewShare\ /MIR /copy:datso /R:2 /W:15 /LOG:C:\Tools\robolog.txt /TEE

Explanations
=============

\\OriginalServer\share\ \NewShare\ is source and destination.

/mir says to copy subdirectories, including empty ones, and purge deleted
items from destination that no longer exist on source (mirror)

/copy:datso specifies the "copy flags", as follows-
D=Data, A=Attributes, T=Timestamps, S=Security=NTFS ACLs, O=Owner info

/R:2 specifies 2 retries

/W:15 specifies a wait time of 15 seconds between retries

/LOG:C:\Tools\robolog.txt overwrites the log on each job

/TEE specifies to write the output to the console as well as the log

I let that run it's course for a day or two while users still connect to and use the old file server. After the initial multi-GB copy is done, the /MIR switch will replicate all changes between the two servers so they are exactly alike. I'll check the log file on the second day for any access errors (you may have to take ownership of some files and grant your admin account access to copy them) and when I am satisfied everything copied over (I verify by checking the properties and make sure size and # of files are the same) then I shut down the old server after hours, modify any login scripts to point to the new server, and bingo, I'm done. No user down time, it takes a grand total of maybe an hour's worth of work on my part, and everyone is happy.