migrating 1 TB of data from 2nd Gen to 5N

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo 5N
1

Our office has been using a Drobo 2nd Gen for many years in a shared network as our file server. Recently bought and set up a 5N with 2 x 2 TB drives. Tried copying over all of the data from the 2G to 5N over a weekend. Even with all workstations off, I encountered numerous halts where the copy process ran into an issue with a file and hung pending my intervention to skip the file and continue. As a result, a process that I expected to take no more than a weekend took 4 days. The upshot was that my users had to continue using the original server while the copy process wrapped up, leaving me with 2 file systems which are almost identical but where the original now has a number of “newer” files.

My question is how to efficiently identify and copy just the changed files over a weekend so I can properly transition over to the 5N? While the copied files themselves have the original time and date stamp, their directories are all dated as of the date of the copy.

If I cannot quickly identify the changed files, should I start over again using a different copy command?

2

hi communitas,
there is a very good tool that i have used when making full backups of my drobos, which is part of the Syncback range of tools (for windows).

if you are on windows, im pretty sure that one of their tools can help you. (some have been free, and others cost only a bit, depending on what you need). i have used syncback se in various ways, including backing up selected data folders on 1 drobo to essentially mirror it to another drobo (in this case from my gen1 onto my gen2) and it is perfect for just picking up missing or changed files/folders etc.

you would need to test it out with a small sample of files and folders, just to be happy with the understanding of how it works, and i would recommend using it in a manual or semi-automatic way to play safe before automating anything, but it has worked pefectly for me for ages.