In previous versions of Windows Server systems, it is recommended to manually pre-seed large data before initial replication for saving time cost. However it will still take time until initial replication finished even data is already copied to the target folder. See:
In Windows Server 2012 and earlier operating systems, initial sync replication required that a destination server populate its database over the network through a resource-expensive version-vectoring process with the source server. For larger datasets, this
can take considerable time (days or weeks), even when you pre-seed data on the destination server.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn281957.aspx
Here are the steps to pre-seed database between Windows Server 2012 R2 systems.
1. Create a test DFS Replication group. In Figure 1, we have two servers. W2012R2-2 is the primary server. Folder on W2012R2 is not defined yet.
Figure 1
2. On W2012R2-2, run the following cmdlet in PowerShell with administrator permission (Figure 2):
Export-DfsrClone –Volume c: -Path “c:\database”
Note: Create c:\database folder before running this cmdlet.
Figure 2
3. After running the cmdlet, it provides suggestions to copy database and file data to target server with Robocopy. Replace <destination path> with correct path as below (Figure 3, 4):
Robocopy.exe “c:\database” “\\w2012r2\c$\database” /B
Robocopy.exe "c:\data" "\\w2012r2\c$\data" /E /B /COPYALL /R:6 /W:5 /MT:64 /XD DfsrPrivate /TEE
Figure 3
Figure 4
4. On W2012R2, run the following cmdlet to import database (Figure 5):
Import-dfsrclone –volume c: -path c:\database
Note: W2012R2 is a new system with no DFSR configuration so we can run the cmdlet directly.
Figure 5
5. After importing, we can see the database is already be imported into C:\System Volume Information\DFSR folder. (Figure 6)
Figure 6
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