Good day to all network admins and enthusiasts alike. We have recently upgraded our servers to R2 and are using DFS to synchronize (for backup purposes) our branch offices. From what I can see everything looks good. But I need a sure fire way to compare the backed up folder and the actual working folder to make sure absolutely everything is getting synchronized then backed up properly.

Ideally I would like to see what is synchronizing at any given time as we have it trickling data slowly through the day and faster through the night. I would also like to see what has and hasnt been synchronized. I would have assumed that M$ would have come up with such tools but they're DFS Management health report do not get so detailed.

Any one run into this issue? And/or have any good suggestions?

Thx.

Dan

Well, there's no Microsoft tool that I'm aware of, but you can create the following registry key on your DFS machines:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dfsr\Parameters\Enable Audit

Enable Object Access Auditing for these servers (via local or domain-based group policy) for SUCCESS.

You will then see security audit events in the upstream and downstream partner every time something is replicated (7002, 7004, 7006 events). You could also write an app to use the WMI APIs for the method version vector (basically you'd take before/after snapshots).

These steps are all I'm aware of, currently.