I know this very issue has been discussed previously, but I'm seeking some clarification. We have a 210 running 5.3.6R2 that we're replacing with an 820 running 6.1.1R1. The filers both have 100mb/full-duplex connections on the same subnet. Our initial plan was to vol copy the single 36GB volume on the 210 to a new volume on the 820. We've used vol copy to move roughly the same amount of data from a 210 to a 740 in the past, although both were running the same DOT version.

After reading the archived discussion on the filesystem reversion necessary when migrating between 5.3.6R2 and 6.0.1R1, I opened a case with NetApp to ask about the time involved for reversion and if the filesystem would be upgraded after the vol copy completed. The support engineer pointed out that there are possible data safety issues with doing a vol copy from the older hardware/OS to the newer and strongly suggested avoiding vol copy and using ndmpcopy instead.

I guess I'm just seeking some additional opinions, as vol copy has worked so well for us in the past. We can certainly use ndmpcopy with some variation of level0/incremental (or rsync), but I'm concerned the move will end up taking longer that way than if we just schedule several hours of downtime and vol copy once.

I don't want to do something unsupported, but my impression (from the archived discussion) was that vol copy should work after the target filesystem was reverted. Is vol copy actually unsupported by NetApp in this scenario? Has anyone done this and had problems?

Thanks very much for your time!

Dawn Lovell dlovell@centurytel.net