Saving and restoring existing Windows shares

Saving and restoring existing Windows shares

Another important tidbit about doing a 64 bit "upgrade" is that not only do you want to back up your NTFS permissions using subinacl but you also want to back up your shares and the permissions for them as well. This will save you a ton of time from doing a restore since you won't have to recover all of your data.

Todd's World: Quick Tip: Back up your NTFS security permissions

Todd's World: Quick Tip: Back up your NTFS security permissions

So you want to backup your NTFS permissions on all of your directories before doing a 64 bit "upgrade"? Use the subinacl command to accomplish this. This command took about 1 hour to back up 2TB of existing data's NTFS permissions on the directory level only.

Outlook 2007 hyperlinks restricted

www links in outlook not operative

Found this helpful article. Basically blow away IE 8 web settings and reregister the following DLL:

regsvr32 /i shdocvw.dll

Volume Shadow Copy tuning

Like most things in life, simply turning on VSS on your servers does not automatically make your life any easier. In a 32 bit environment, file servers can get overwhelmed with server requests which will fill up your Kernel paged pool and cause VSS to time out during times of heavy IO load. There are a few tips you can use to maximize your VSS so that your servers will continue to run smoothly:

1. Move the location of your shadow copies to a volume that is not being used for shares - this one makes pretty good sense in that you don't want your shadow copy creation fighting for resources for your actual data. Shadow copies are created in 16kb chunks so choose a cluster size to match this when you create your volume. You can use the VSSADMIN.exe commandline tool to change the location of your storage by adding the storage to the secondary drive.

2. Increase the maximum size of your Shadow Copy creations to 3gb from 300 meg. You can do this by setting the registry key at: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VolSnap\MinDiffAreaFileSize : REG_DWORD : 3000 (Decimal) - this will improve IO performance of the creation of the shadow copies.

3. Tune the size of your paged pool: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312362

After doing all of this, the best recommendation I can give you is to go to a 64 bit version of Windows Server which will give you a much better foundation for your file servers. Unfortunately there is no upgrade path from 32 bit to 64 bit and going to Enterprise doesn't buy you anything because it is still a 32 bit architecture.