Best practice for migrating Shares and Permissions?

Question

We have a Windows 2008 R2 server which is replacing an old Windows Storage Server.

The datastore is attached via iSCSI so I do not need to transfer any data. The iSCSI connection is setup on the new machine, and now I'm wondering:

How should I transfer the shares and permissions?

Do I use PERMCOPY for permissions or is there something better as of Windows 2008 R2 (compared to Windows 2000):

PERMCOPY //SourceServer ShareName //DestinationServer ShareName

Is exporting/importing registry still a valid option? from:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares

Any help/tips would be greatly appreciated.

@SpacemanSpiff ~28TB, 19 Shares, and ~10 departments, several ACLs, and quite a few individual/one-offs which would be nearly impossible to track down and take forever to move over manually. — TryTryAgain, Dec 07 '12 at 01:49

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 07 '12 at 10:12

2

If your servers are part of an AD domain, you just have to enable the share on the new server. The acl will be kept. I had to do this once with the import/export registry, you will have to reboot the server.

answered Dec 07 '12 at 10:12

dje31

46
1

So exporting/importing the registry will carry over the actual Shares (names, paths, etc) and AD will take care of the ACLs? Am I following correctly? That's what I'm hoping for. That makes sense, That would be great! – TryTryAgain Dec 07 '12 at 10:16
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This would be a more useful answer if you gave some details on how you achieved this, or linked to some documentation. – dunxd Dec 07 '12 at 12:07
@TryTryAgain: Yes you are correct. I do not have documentation, but i remember using the "reg" command line to add the registry key. But be carreful with the "Shares" registry key, you might not have the same shares on both servers. – dje31 Dec 07 '12 at 14:31
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/125996/en-us - The procees will be: 1)stop the server service - 2) edit registry key 3) start service – dje31 Dec 07 '12 at 14:40

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 07 '12 at 05:12

We do this rather regularly, and find that robocopy or xcopy work well for copying the data. This allows us to copy from the source several times to gather new or changed files, which is extremely useful for your data size. My recommendation is to do one share at a time or perhaps one department at a time for good measure. Be sure to pay attention to the switches you use, because some of the options can be dangerous, such as sync, which could delete files in many instances. As far as copying shares, exporting/importing from the registry is still a valid option, and would be a great way to accomplish the task at hand.

"The datastore is attached via iSCSI so I do not need to transfer any data." — TryTryAgain, Dec 07 '12 at 07:01

Best practice for migrating Shares and Permissions?

2 Answers2