Hi Dave,
On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 5:39 AM, David.Ashton@rullion.co.uk wrote:
Hi.
I'm planning to migrate a windows server full of data to a CIFS vol on my FAS3020. This volume will be snapmirrored to a remote filer over a 10Mb line.
The data is 300GB+, and its already a fairly busy line. Time to initialise a mirror is going to be over a week ( and i have to throttle during the day)
Moving the remote filer temporarily is not something I want to do.
I'm using Secure Copy (http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/securecopy/) to do the copying.
Is there anyway to bypass the complete 300GB snapmirror initialize? What is more palatable is:
- copying data to a USB disk and transporting that to the remote site,
copying over to the mirror destination vol. OR 2. Performing the secure copy twice - transporting the server (or its disks for use in another server) and copying directly to the mirror destination vol
Any ideas or am I SOL?
If you want a snapmirror relation, you will need the snapmirror initialize, no way to circumvent it, because it needs to do a blockwise copy of the complete volume, including metadata. The metadata is stuff that isn't presented to you, it's internal to NetApp only, so you can't copy that.
If you want to use a host-based mirror (which is not the exact same as SnapMirror) I would recommend using tools that also copy the ACL's on the files, such as robocopy. Secure copy, to my knowledge doesn't copy the ACL's, which means you loose the information of who can access which data, resulting in Joe the Plummer having access to the banking details of Mr. CEO. Might not be a good idea, given the credibility of Joe these days.
HTH & HAND,
Nils