o "Level i" copies will *not* work with level 0-9 copies of the same source and destination. That is, you cannot do a "-level 0" ndmpcopy to move data initially, then use "-level i" to make updates. For that matter, you can't use any other method to do the initial copy such as "vol copy", dump/restore, rsync, etc. If you want to use "-level i" at all, you must use it to do the initial copy in addition to all updates (until you want to stop using ndmpcopy for updates).
Thanks for the clarification.
o Don't modify the destination until you're done ndmpcopy'ing to it. Once the destination is modified, another "level i" will likely *not* be able to update that destination.
Someone suggested having the destination 'offline' until the moment we are ready to switch the volumes (i.e. we have two identical filesystems).
Also be aware that if you are copying the entire vol1 to vol2, snapmirror is definitely going to be faster than incremental ndmpcopy. Not sure if you have a snapmirror license, but assuming the deltas on the source volume aren't enormous, the final snapmirror sync can often take only a few minutes.
I believe we have the license for snapmirror, but have not been using it. Would snapmirror be a better solution in this situation? Is it relevant for snapmirror that source and destination volumes have different number of drives and RAID sizes? And that they reside on the same filer?
Thanks again,
Robert