DFS setup with large initial folder

Question

I have two offices that both use a similar network share structure, and often generate the same files. I would like to implement DFS between the two locations, but am concerned that the main folder at each location is too large for the amount of time to sync.

HeadOffice has a folder A:\files\ with 18,000 files @ 120gb

RemoteOffice has a folder B:\files\ with 28,000 files @ 133Gb

Currently HeadOffice is running 2012r2 and RemoteOffice is 2003r2. I understand 2003 will not work, so I will set up a new 2012r2 machine just for DFS. I would mimick the same folder setup and copy from 2003 to 2012 locally.

There is a lot of duplicates between these two offices, which I want to get into sync with DFS.

The VPN link between the two locations can handle 16mbps. If I throttle it to 10mbps, best case is 30hours to copy from Remote to HeadOffice.

Would there be an initial scan to see which files already exist at the other location and ignore those? What about copying the contents to a flash or usb hdd and shipping it to the other location and getting them 'almost' in sync.

I can dedicate downtime (weekend) to sync the folders if DFS will initially scan for differences.

Can anyone offer suggestions how to best implement this to limit the bandwidth for the initial setup?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You should not try to use DFS-R to magically 'merge' two different folders. It will just make a huge mess of things.

For your initial setup, just pick one side, and sync that up using a supported preseed method. I have mostly used the robocopy method of prestaging, make sure you use the specified command line options. Your initial prestage can include copying to a portable media to be transported between sites. Make sure you use the NTFS filesystem.

After you have one side syncd use some other method to de-duplicate files and merge changed files into the replicated folder.