So we are getting ready to roll out our new fileserver at work. It's actually an old fileserver with new disks, but that's a helluva lot better than our current situation (our Exchange server functions as a fileserver, print server, and primary Active Directory server). Now that our office is growing, it's time to start distributing the load a bit and add in some redundancy.

We only have about 30 users in the office. Since some users are more technical than others, I've decided to stage the migration and do the engineers first, then sales, and finally the marketing and executives. I figure the engineers won't freak out if they suddenly have a new mapped drive.

Since I'm doing the move in stages, I needed a way to "rsync" their files from the current fileserver to the new one. I was considering using the Cygwin tools to accomplish this, but I was worried about NTFS permissions. There are programs out there that will "fix" permissions, but why resort to that when you don't need to? There were a number of solutions to pick from. My colleague decided Robocopy would do the trick. Robocopy is a tool based on Microsoft's XCOPY and is available on the Windows 2000/3 Resource Kit.

Not only will Robocopy handle file and directory permissions with ease, but it also has a number of other features that is going to make this migration really easy.

• Can auto-restart a copy in the event of a failure
  
• Will retry a user-defined number of times before giving up (for instance, if the file is locked)
  
• Use wildcard characters in file and directory names
  
• Delete destination file and directories that no longer exist in the source
  
• Schedulable to run automatically
  
• Monitor a directory for changes, then automatically start a copy
  
• Can copy files based on attributes such as last access dates
  
• Bandwidth usage can be controlled
  
• Has very verbose and legible logging
  
• Can use UNIX style switch flags (-foo instead of /foo) and path delimiters (/ instead of \)
  
• Can control how deep you want to recursively copy directories
  

So I'll post more news about the fileserver migration when it happens.