I have 2 servers that I'm testing with, before I do this in live environment. Server 2003 R2, fully patched.
I have 20 gig of data on server1 and I want to replicate that to a folder on server2. If I use robocopy to make an exact copy of the contents of the folder to be replicated from server1 to server2, and then link those folders in a DFS-R replication group I think it's supposed to compare the files on each side, and sync those that are different. Since I just copied them with "robocopy \server1\target \server2\target /SEC /MIR" they should be identical.
What actually happens is that DFS-R takes the data from server1 and paves over all the files in the server2 folder. It transfers all 20 gig of files over, which is specifically what I want to avoid.
-- Below is more info on my goal, but don't let it confuse answering the above --
Phase 2 of this test is to copy the data from \server2\target to \server2\target_new, stop DFS-R, rename target to target_old, and target_new to target, then restart DFS-R and have it not notice the folder got copied and renamed. This is because I'm going to take the data from X:\jobdocs and move it to Y:\ and mount Y:\ as a junction in the X:\ filesystem. I can't change the drive letter or folder path or I break applications. X:\jobdocs is being replicated across the WAN to another datacenter. I do NOT want to re-sync 500 gig of data just because I copied it locally to a different folder, so I'm trying to figure out how to keep DFS-R happy and ignorant of the change.