Migrating off your Windows boxes onto the S7000

[Hebdenlad]

Hello again,

Another posting so soon... whats going on I hear you ask? Well maybe not....

Anyway, Today I'm going to tgalk about migration off the legacy Windows servers you have onto the nice new S7000's that are popping up all over the place and I am indebted to John at Settle College for this one (beers (or coffee) at least when we meet).

John told me about a basic migration tool he found on the Microsoft Technet website called "Richcopy". It allowed him to migrate data off his old Windows boxes quickly and easily on to his nice new S7110 4TB.

He did say that some of the extremely long file names that students had given certain documents (i.e. jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.doc) were not picked up but it did give him an error report so he could look at those individual files.

I've tried it here on my laptop to copy across some data onto my backup drive (yes I am a diligent little soldier and backup my data on a very regular basis - must be the StorageTek in me coming out).

It's very easy to use, quick and above all free.

Here's the link: Free Utility: RichCopy, an Advanced Alternative to RoboCopy

right, off to make a chilli con carne for tea.

Cheers,

Phil

[DMcCoy]

Some issues with richcopy:

Not all options work - Timestamps didn't get copied when I used it iirc.
Do not copy multiple files simultaneously! It was quicker for me to delete and recopy with robocopy than it was to defragment the resultant mess with multiple files copied at once.

[maniac]

Richcopy just did not work for me when I tried it recently for migrating all my data to my new domain, it literally crashed out after a few minutes and produced a serious error report every time I tried it.

I used Robocopy with the GUI so save having to type it in on the command line, that completed very very quickly, and produced a nice log file of everything it copied. Not one single error reported throughout the whole process.

I believe someone on here is working on a file moving tool to do the same sort of things as robocopy/richcopy as well.

Mike.

[Soulfish]

I believe someone on here is working on a file moving tool to do the same sort of things as robocopy/richcopy as well.

Mike.

Edumove is the tool you're thinking of (EduMove - Coming Soon). Hopefully it'll be out soon

Provided it's out in the next week or so I'm planning on using it to migrate data to our 7110

[john]

Well its worked fine for me, for me the timestamps are not that bothering (I can live without them) and it just seemed to work and log what it didn't move (eg the long file names which always had crud in them like silly text files saying haha wasted ur time etc) but hey as with everything you find something that works well for one doesn't for another

[Duke]

I couldn't use Robocopy as I've got a couple of 64-bit servers and Robocopy isn't x64 compatible. I think I looked at richcopy and it seemed good, can't remember why I didn't use it. Personally we just go back to using xcopy scripts here. It's old and awkward, but it does 'just work', although it still fails on long pathnames.

Credit to my colleague Chris Hatherall (he's on Edugeek somewhere) for this (edited) one:

@echo off
Echo From Server To Server File Copy
echo From Server To Server File Copy > %temp%\Move.log
echo. >> %temp%\Move.log
echo.

pause

echo File Copy starting at %time%
echo File Copy starting at %time% >> %temp%\Move.log

xcopy "x:\Path\To\Source" \\S7000\path /e /d /v /c /i /f /h /r /y 1>> %temp%\Move.log 2>> %temp%\MoveErrors.log

echo File Copy finished at %time%
echo File Copy finished at %time% >> %temp%\Move.log

pause
notepad %temp%\Move.log
notepad %temp%\MoveErrors.log

After that I go through the error log and found out what failed, fix things like long paths and permissions then re-run it, make sure there's no errors. If you want something easier on the eyes then I run WinMerge (open-source, free) on the two directories to confirm they're the same. Note that this script wipes out permissions on files/folders, which was intentional for moving our shared resources as I wanted to reset them anyway.

Cheers,
Chris