Help me, Lazyweb! I’m looking for ideas on setting up some sort of real-time mirroring or sync between folders on a couple Windows servers. Years ago I used FolderShare for this, but that’s gone; folded into Windows Live Sync and I suspect my folders are too big for it (but am willing to be corrected! Details below).
Here’s a copy of what I put up on ServerFault.com but hasn’t received any input (yet)
[Updated] Deleted that original ServerFault.com post. Had too much info and no reads. Here’s a link to the newer less-info more-active version.
While rebuilding our Dev environment I decided to build the Dev web server on Windows 2003 Web edition to be the same as what is in production. Alas, one small snag: Our production team spend a lot of time working with PDFs on the dev web server via File Shares and Windows 2003 Web edition has a 10 session limit.
Ugh.
So, I need to do something different to stop the session limit issues. I’m thinking that I’ll copy the PDF libraries to our File Server (win2k3 Standard R2) and implement some sort of real time mirroring between the File server and Web server for those directories.
We’re talking about 1 “main” directory, 500 sub-directories (at various levels) and just under 10K documents.
What would you suggest for the mirroring?
Stuff I’ve looked at
I looked at the “new” DFS Replication that was introduced with Windows 2003 R2 but that’s not an option with the non-R2 Windows 2003 Web edition. The “old” DFS is there (remember Roots and Links?) but I had some rough experiences with it and reliability in the olden days of Windows 2000. Perhaps it is better with 2003?
Windows Live Sync might be interesting, but I think I exceed the limitations, depending on how you translate this particular note (source):
You can synchronize up to 20 folders containing up to 20,000 files each. Files can’t be larger than 4 gigabytes (GB).
Think that includes subfolders?
As you can tell by what I’ve looked at so far, free or cheap would be really awesome.
Worse case, I could run robocopy /mir as a scheduled job every 1 minute but that’s a little abusive!
Better ideas?
Possibly Related posts:
How about a paid version of dropbox? a little more room and it would do the trick.
Yep, that’s a thought. Especially now that lan sync is built-in — I sure wouldn’t want to have to pump all that to the cloud and back down the same line!
Oh hey. Those 10k files are only 1.41 GB in size. We might have a winner here!
There are some limitations to the Dropbox approach.
1) Have to use pyDropboxPath to move the Dropbox folder to somewhere that doesn’t end with “My Dropbox” (Yeah, you can move folders but it will always append that by default).
2) Have to use srvany to get Dropbox to run as a service. Can’t always be logged into servers just to keep the sync going.
I’m not sure this is the right tool for the job anymore…
Considered creating a VPN connection and backupexec to do the job?
Nope! Does backupexec offer some sort of “almost real-time” mirroring features?
[...] week I put a plea for help up about my quest to find a way to mirror some directories between servers. That isn’t so [...]