Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'm soon going to be doing a large migration of an old-school web server that serves mostly ASP pages (currently on a Windows 2003 server) to a newer, virtualized Windows 2008 server. This new server is going to be in a different domain, as well.

So I'm copying the root web folder, and all its subfolders and files, to this new server. I'd like to keep permissions intact. It's also pretty massive - I'd like to be able to compress it before transferring to the new server with permissions intact. Any way to do that? And will the new server being in a different AD domain screw with my plans?

share|improve this question
which permissions the IIS permissions or the filesystem permissions? Are you also looking to move the website or just the files? –  Jim B Nov 15 '11 at 20:40
Filesystem, and just the files - it's old-school ASP so there's not an incredible amount of things to do other than just move the files. –  Chris Nov 15 '11 at 21:51
you may also wish to review differences between iis6 and 7.x –  Jim B Nov 16 '11 at 7:08
add comment

3 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

To copy all data and permissions, you can use robocopy per this technet blog post:

ROBOCOPY /Mir <Source> <Target>

If you have domain-specific ACEs and you're moving to a different domain, you're not going to be able to do much other than document it and manually intervene.

share|improve this answer
According to the quetion it's a webserver, so it's going to have local account and local group perms (in addition to possible domain ACE entries) –  Jim B Nov 15 '11 at 20:47
@JimB I didn't say otherwise. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. –  MDMarra Nov 15 '11 at 20:48
I'm just trying to point out that since its a website, its not an "if" you have to manually repermission, its a certainty some local perms will be applied. That's all. –  Jim B Nov 16 '11 at 7:06
As I understand, robocopy does copy the ACLs with the SIDs, not usernames. Accounts with the same name will have different SIDs on the new server. –  Posipiet Nov 16 '11 at 8:40
@Posipiet but well known users and groups will not. There are also tools that will copy accounts and groups while preserving the SId, though that's outside the scope of this question. –  MDMarra Nov 16 '11 at 11:46
show 1 more comment

Robocopy or rsync is ok for making the copy (I use these) Make sure you use the latest version of robocopy. You can find rsync in the cygwin collection. If you have a huge amount of data and a slow network: consider using external disk, tape, ...

For the ACL's: you need to document this (maybe you want this documented anayway) Highly recommended: setacl This is a free tool you can obtain from helgeklein.com You can make a backup of your acl's and later restore them.

According to the documentation you can also replace ACE's of your old domain with these of the new domain (I did not test this)

I would suggest 1. make a backup of your ACL's (setacl) 2. make a compressed archive (7z is good for this) 3. get your data at the other server (robocopy, rsync) 4. make a restore of the ACL's 5. test, verify

share|improve this answer
add comment

Use the I would probably start by looking at web deploy I would not reccomend simply copying the files as it seems to me from your descritption that you have a sizeable website. A tool like robocopy is fine for copying files but could have all sorts of permissions that you'd could spend ages trying to fix from a robocopy. Webdeploy can create a zip package of everything prior to copying manually or sync the servers.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


