We're working with consultants on a large DFS replication project and we experienced a significant loss of data during the initial replication.
While trying to identify what happened the consultant came back and said this was due to using the same drive letter on both servers involved in the replication. I'm trying to determine if this is a legitimate concern.
Technical details are below:
Server 1 has a file share residing on the D: named Share 1 to sync to Server 2's D:
Server 2 has a file share residing on its D: named Share 2 to sync to Server 2's D:
Would cross syncing these two shares to each other cause an issue? The initial replication was going fine, completing around 60%, until the servers got confused and then Server 2 thought it had all of the data from Server 1 and instructed Server 1 to delete all the rest of its data because it was no longer needed.
Any light you folks can shed on this would be very much appreciated. Thank you.
Best Answer
No, this is absolutely not the source of your issue.
I have never seen any documentation that would support this claim, and furthermore, I manage an enterprise with 18 sites, dozens of DFS replication groups, half a dozen DFS namespaces containing hundreds of shares with terabytes of data and have never had an issue that our replication groups replicate almost exclusively from the same drive letter to the same drive letter. (I put a lot of effort into standardizing our server builds, so all our file servers have the same drive letters for the same volumes.)
For example:
Or if you prefer, here's one from the same drive letter and even folder path, for a file server migration:
Edit: I found another highly pertinent example which illustrates why DFS-R doesn't care about drive letters.
Below, a replication group I created for a fileserver migration. Among other problems, I'm combining two seperate volumes of departmental shares into one volume, so on the destination server, I have two replicated folders on the
F:drive. (I'll drop the contents of both into a single folder later):This works just fine because each replicated folder (even ones on the same volume) stores its own the metadata and DFS-R data precisely so that different replicated folders don't confuse each others' replication, as you can see below: