I’m about to perform a file share migration between hosts on Windows. I’ve done this a few times in my career, all long ago, and I believe the tools used in the past (for better or worse) were robocopy, RichCopy, SyncToy, etc.
Given that restic now supports backing up file attributes and SecurityDescriptors, I am wondering if anyone has any comments on whether it is a suitable tool for conducting the migration (backup from source host to restic repo, restore to new host). I recognize that using this method is somewhat less efficient because it involves having a third place for the data (the restic repo) but my thought was that it might allow me to conduct the migration in a few steps (allow people to continue to use the file share on the source while most of the data is migrated, i.e. backed up and restored, then backup the changes, then restore what are essentially deltas).
Does anybody have any thoughts on whether restic is suitable for this purpose? I’m sorta thinking out loud here and haven’t decided how I’ll do the migration yet.
Not the same scenario as yours, but I’ve done several migrations of user data from old to new macOS clients using restic, it was a superb experience I must say, very quick.
I use Restic to migrate my Windows and Mac users at work all the time. One of the main things I use it for, honestly. I’ll then hold onto the profile for a few months, just in case anything goes wrong. I typically backup to a 4TB 40Gbps USB4 NVMe SSD, using automatic compression and a 128MB pack size. It’s usually done in 10-15 minutes, max - even profiles as large as 1-2TB, now that pretty much all our machines are SSDs. Then I have an alias on my Mac called “upload” and it copies the snapshots to our SharePoint space using max compression, which I typically do after the migration is done to free up space on the NVMe chip.
The only thing I don’t do, really, is ACLs / permissions. I always put it in a “_RESTORED” folder in their user profile, then help them move stuff over manually. Cuts down on the clutter, I find.
@rawtaz I’d be interested to hear how you do your macOS migrations, though!
Nothing fancy. I rarely have to do it nowadays, but what I do/did was to simply back up ~ on the old machine, with some exclusions (this was done either as part of the client’s regular backups every hour, or ad-hoc when needed for migrating a non-backed up client). Then on the new client I just restored the same folder as ~ for the same user, and made sure it had the right ownership and permissions. That was it. The backups were usually stored on a local rest-server instance so over the local network it was all fast.