File Server Migration Toolkit

[gshaw]

Just having a look at this as way to move our user shares from the current Storage Server 2003 box to a new 2008 VM once we get the new servers in...

 

Download details: Microsoft File Server Migration Toolkit 1.2

 

Has anyone done a migration with it before? Does it work as well as it looks?

 

I'm not using DFS so will need to update folder redirection GPOs and profile path settings in AD but I can live with that.

[john]

I've used the tool in the past seems fine just needs plenty of disk space on both server, more than the size of the files you are moving on both if I recall but it was an older version, like most of these MS Migration tools they usually do as they say on the tin

[Ashm]

I had to do this recently, I ended up using Robocopy (included with server 2k8). File Server Migration Toolkit seemed like a bit of a faff to be honest.

 

With robocopy I was able to do an initial sync and then do a final quick one just before changing all the Home dir locations, login scripts etc.

[FN-GM]

I have used an older version a few years ago. Worked really well and had no problems at all.

[teejay]

Same as Ashm here, did ours with Robocopy, worked very nicely and that was with over 1500 users.

[gshaw]

I'm leaning more towards Robocopy now, having read some of the odd things the migration toolkit does with folder names the Robocopy method looks more solid.

 

Only thing I'll need to do is back up the reg key from the old server with all the share info as I've got a legacy of 200 user shares with weird folder setup and permissions that I don't have time to mess about with this summer so just going to have to shift them across as-is for now and sort it another time once the virtualised infrastructure is all sorted out...

[SkreeM1980]

The FSMT is fine, there are a couple of gotcha's around the folder naming, but it is easily resolved if you do a find replace through the XML file generated before doing the migration for real, is very good at maintaing permissions on NTFS and Shares, i think there's also something about all files being read only that happened to me one of the times i used it, but it was a while asgo now.

 

Skr

[Sam_Brown]

Used it a few times. Only issue I had was it would only work with file paths under 250ish characters which was a bit of an pain due to some deep folder sturctures we had.