1

Hello all. Here is the situation:

My IT level: Green(ish), I have never setup a new server before, never setup server roles before, never migrated servers on my own before, so there may be a lot of ‘simple’ questions I might have throughout this discussion.

I am migrating data from a Windows 2012 Essentials server to a Windows 2016 Standard Server, all necessary FSMO server roles have been installed by the outgoing technician, but I have never migrated data from an old DC to what will become the new DC.

My base question is simply, “What is the fastest way to migrate this data?” It’s only 3TB of data, but I am unsure of the fastest way to migrate it from one physical server to another.

I can provide any additional information as requested, sorry for the simple request everyone.

7 Spice ups
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Makes me want to ask a lot of questions about physical setup but, presuming the servers are in the same closet/room and on the same switch or close by, you might want to look at Robocopy. That was my go to at my last company when I had a lot to move.

Personally, I would want to ensure there is as much bandwidth between the two servers as possible. If you have a fiber connection, great! If not, then see if you can team a pair of GB ports.

Hopefully you can run this during down time. If you have drive mapping, make sure that is taken care of in GPOs before people log back in expecting to find data in the old location (also, remove access to the old location from users. They have a habit of making changes to the old repository after you have moved to the new one).

3

You have a lot more to be concerned about then transferring the actual data. If this is becoming your new DC you need to make sure you are setting it up as a DC. You could probably even add an additional DC get everything replicating and then proceed with removing the old dc from the environment.

But long story short you want to make sure you are installing the correct roles and features on this new DC. Is your current DHCP server the DC? or is DHCP being handed out by the firewall and your DC is handling DNS?

I am going to send you an article on how to migration FISMO roles so you can go over everything and verify that the correct roles and features have been set up this far.

In terms of data can you be more specific? Do you have file shares on this DC? Are you just speaking in regards to the data the system is using for everything it has installed and running?

Its not as easy as copy and paste? There is alot more going on when moving from one DC to another. If he already migrated the fismo roles you may already have a good portion of the work complete on the new DC.

4

You never want to use copy and paste for such operations, as if there is any error the operation will fail and you will have to do it over again.

Robocopy and Roadkill’s Unstoppable copier are good examples of file copy utilities that handle such a job, and will continue to copy when there are errors, and can create a log to diagnose what failed.

Additionally such utilities save the files with the same NTFS permissions so you don’t need to mess with perms after the operation.

5

If your FSMO roles have been transferred already, be aware your Essentials Server is going to start shutting itself down after 21 days. You should save the role migration until the end, just so you know.

There are many how-to’s out there for moving data. Basically you use robocopy, with the proper switchesm so you retain NTFS permissions. You can also export shares and their permissions from the registry so you don’t have to recreate those.