We have a 3 branch servers each with a de-duplication enabled volume. The data from these 3 servers is to be consolidated onto a single virtual file server in a data centre. The file server in the data centre has a volume available with de-duplication enabled but currently has no data stored on it. I have the following questions around the copying of the deduped data from branch servers to this centralised data centre server. We must use Robocopy or something similar due to restrictions by the hosted provider:

• If I robocopy the data from the branch servers without copying the 'System Volume Information' folder which holds the de-duplication chunk blocks, will the data be unreadable on the new file server?
• If the solution is to copy the data from the branch offices, including each system volume information folder, how can I merge this onto the new server without overwriting the chunk information?

When copying data from dedup'ed volume, make sure you exclude system volume info folder: only include the folders containing your files. Do not use /XJ switch. Robocopy will expand files from a dedup'ed volume, so that you can move them safely to a new location where they will be optimized by a local dedup job. I don't think there is any way to merge dedup stores from multiple machines: copying dedup store will overwrite existing one, so that you end up with a corrupt volume.

Thank you for the information. I have already used Robocopy to copy to a USB drive but have not excluded the system volume information folder. Will I have to copy again and exclude this folder or can i simply copy the files to the target volume but exclude the system volume information folder?

Hi,

By default you should not have permission to copy files inside System Volume Information folder.

As Gleb said Deduplication support to copy files out to another place, it will copy the real file instead of just a "shortcut".

But there is no way to combine several dedupped volume into one, you will have to copy them to the new volume and re-run a dedup process.