Hey all, I am in the sysadmin of medium sized windows office network consisting of dfs structured file servers and active directory servers running windows 2008 r2 I am currently migrating all data onto a SAN. we are in the process of moving all of our roaming profiles (windows xp) from the local storage system (currently we have a very screwed two server dfs replication... that decided to stop replicating) to a SAN drive, the problem is with profile directories you dont generally have ownership or access to those directories (unless you take over them, which destroys how they work) my question is how do you move these directories without damaging the file permissions. My second question is about the home directories, I recently migrated them, but what are the standard permissions for users to access their file. I find that permissions do not replicate through to sub dirs reliably does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks all.

Hi Mcassar, For the first question, I suggest using File Server Migration Toolkit to migrate the data from one server to the other. It is a pretty handy tool and it can consolidate DFS. From my experience, it will migrate the files and folders together with the permissions even if you don’t have the ownership of them. FSMT will keep the log of all the data migrated. You can always check the log for the failures afterwards. Here’s the download link of FSMT. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d00e3eae-930a-42b0-b595-66f462f5d87b&displaylang=en For the second question, I think it is recommended to give home folder users modify permission which will allow them read and write access in their own homefolders. If you find the permissions are not inherited for the sub folders. Please change the owner to administrators and take ownership and be sure to select the checkbox of Replace owner on subcontainers and objects. If you want the sub folders having the same permissions of the parent folder. You can modify the permission of parent folder by right clcking and selecting Properties, and then hitting Advance button, checking the checkbox of Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object. Regards, Karen JiThis posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

hi , I would also think about the Robocopy which gives admins an option to migrate profiles but only disadvantage i have observed is that users should be offline / not logged on because robocopy cannot migrate the active profiles . Also you need to consider the TS profiles while you are migrating.

Hey guys, Thanks for both answers. Karen, I get how the propagation works however I do find that sometimes, high level folders and files (usually files in the desktop or my documents dir) just do not get the permissions and it requires you to rerun the propagation at a higher level. Ill be testing robocopy out today Sainath so ill let you know how that goes. Unfortunatly I dont think that migration tool kit will do what we need as we have massive fragmentation over the two servers that we run dfs on. Thanks again for your answers ill keep you posted how everything goes on tuesday (australian time)

Hey Guys, We have not had much luck with robo copy (file permission errors) decided to do a very painful dfs copy to another server then back again to the san. Thanks again for your help guys. Mark.