Advice on Data copy

[katana6434]

Hi All


I have scenario where I need to copy data from one drive to another drive on the same server. Both of these drives are LUNs on different SANs.

The constraint that I have is that data can only be copied out of hours. It can start at 6pm and needs to be finshed by 6am the next morning. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, but the data that I am copying is around 770GB and consists of around 16.5 million files. It would take around 2-3 days to copy it all in one go.

Ideally I need some software which could sync it from one drive to another only between the times above. So it owuld start the copy at 6pm, stop cpying at 6am and than start of again from where it left off at 6pm again.

It this possible. Anybody know any software that could do this.

Thanks

 

[katana6434]

You should check out robocopy. an MS support tool, now included in 2008.

You can set it to sync everynight so that your switchover night has the last nights delta is as little as possible.

Great tool, suprised you havent heard of it.

i have heard of Robocopy and have used it in the past. I don't think it would be suitable in this case as the copy would not finish in the desired timeframe and then there would be no way to 'pause' the copy during the working day, unless I am mistaken.

 

[katana6434]

Thanks for those. Looks like I will investigate robocopy a bit more. I knew about the /mir command, alhtough I am a bit dubious about how long it could take to scan the directory. This could significantly eat into the copy time available.

I will look into the /RH and /PF switches.

Thanks