Copy Files and Folder Across Partitions and Maintain the Folder Permission and Access Control List (ACL)
Scenario:
Last weekend we added a new storage for company File Server. We need to move all the Departments’ folders to the new storage while maintaining the folder security permission. There are thousands of folders inside around 50 different main folders. We certainly cannot afford the chance of losing the folder permission security properties that already created for several years.
What I know is Windows Server 2003 can only retain these security properties if the folder is copied in the same partition. While if you copy the folder across different partition, it will remove all of the security properties. Sounds like disaster to me…
My work partner then told me about the xcopy command that can be use to solve the issue.
How to do it:
I used the command xcopy to move all of these folders. It worked flawlessly. Here is the syntax:
xcopy "C:\Source Folder\Folder1" "D:\Target Folder\Folder1" /s /i /o
/s means to include copying subfolders
/i means to create the folder1 folder
/o is to include the folder and file ownership and ACL information
for the complete option you can type xcopy /?
If you prefer a GUI version of xcopy, you can try the free DupliTree from the following website:
http://5ko.free.fr/en/duplitree.html
I have tested the software and it seems to work pretty well. However I didn’t use it during the actual moving of the folders cause I was kinda afraid if the software crashed during the process.