Attack of the Clones

DFSR – or any proper file replication technology - spends a great deal of time validating that servers have the same knowledge. This is critical to safe and reliable replication; if a server doesn’t know everything about a file, it can’t tell its partner about that file. In DFSR, we often refer to this “initial build” and “initial sync” processing as “initial replication”. DFSR needs to grovel files and folders, record their information in a database on that volume, exchange that information between nodes, stage files and create hashes, then transmit that data over the network. Even if you preseed the files on each server before configuring replication, the metadata transmissions are still necessary. Each server performs this initial build process locally, and then the non-authoritative server checks his work against an authoritative copy and reconciles the differences. MORE