Any ideas-quickest way, how to transfer a 200GB mdf file from one server to another?
-
Does this belong on ServerFault? – SLaks Feb 11 '10 at 14:22
-
1Are they in the same network? – fretje Feb 11 '10 at 14:23
-
1An external drive? – Vincent Ramdhanie Feb 11 '10 at 14:24
-
@Vincent: an external drive connected how? USB 2.0 is quite a bottlenect given today's HD speeds. – Michael Borgwardt Feb 11 '10 at 14:30
-
2@Michael eSata would seem the obvious answer – Andy Feb 11 '10 at 14:52
-
little to over hasted question ? usb, network share, robocopy ? – laurens Feb 11 '10 at 14:52
6 Answers
Massimo recently asked a question that is somewhat similiar, albeit he was talking about a high-latency network. You don't specify what kind of network it is (gigabit Ethernet LAN, some kind of WAN, etc), but the answer I gave there might give you some ideas, as well.
In particular, the uftp utility that I suggested gave Massimo some pretty decent-looking results on his high-latency WAN. I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet over a gigabit Ethernet LAN but from its description it sounds like it would do a pretty good job of filling up a pipe.
It uses multicast IP to do the copying, so if you only end up needing to copy the file to multiple locations this tool would be a "win" immediately since the file only needs to traverse the network once to be received by an arbitrary number of destinations.
![](../../users/profiles/7200.webp)
- 141,071
- 19
- 191
- 328
I would make moving it safely the first priority, and speed second. Safest way is to backup and restore, that could be made faster using backup compression tools such as litespeed - would result in a smaller file to copy / restore.
Less-safe options will be dettach / attach etc.
![](../../users/profiles/7016.webp)
- 111
- 2
I would probably use the Microsoft eseutil tool. It's not specifically for this purpose (it's a tool to move large exchange databases around) but can be used for other databases and logs.
From Microsft: "Depending on disk and network conditions, copy file mode may be able to copy a file up to 20 percent faster than a normal copy because the copy file mode in Eseutil copies files in larger blocks of data."
More info at Microsoft here.
![](../../users/profiles/2277.webp)
- 4,092
- 1
- 29
- 38
-
"The Exchange Server Database Utilities (Eseutil.exe) /Y copy file mode is optimized to copy very large files efficiently. You can use the /Y switch to copy a database file or log file. However, the mode is not suitable as a general purpose copy utility. " – icky3000 Feb 11 '10 at 14:37
-
I read it that the utility can be used for database and log files, but not for other general purpose copies? – Marko Carter Feb 11 '10 at 15:04
Well my first thought would be netcat, if you are on a Gigabit Network this should work rather quickly. Netcat Examples
![](../../users/profiles/11568.webp)
- 513
- 2
- 8
Given that a mdf is mostly text (unless you're storing binary images etc in the tables, in which case you should take a good hard look at what you're doing), zipping up the file will give some pretty impressive results. In the past we've zipped a 80gb mdf down to 10gb - this makes it a lot easier to copy around.
![](../../users/profiles/97022.webp)
- 497
- 2
- 6
- 15