Copying NSF files to the cloud

This is an old tip that I never thought I would use again but has come back to life with the advent of the cloud:

Scenario:

We are migrating multiple servers from onsite to the cloud, the bandwidth of this copy means that it won’t happen within 24 hours and it definitely won’t happen within the maintenance window we have, normally with Lotus Notes migrations from one server to another, this wouldn’t be an issue as Domino replication has been a model of stability and ease of use for well over 10 years, HOWEVER there are tons and I do mean tons of complex replication settings in this clients setup, a lot of them unknown or unremembered to the client, so they have found that using replication means they will miss some of these, and after having a look at them I tend to agree, so file copy it is..

NSF files tend to be a bit bulky, and zip up really rather well so zipping them up before moving them over them makes sense, but we don’t want to do one large zip, because 1) The target file system doesn’t have a lot of extra space on it, and 2) The actual copy will take several days so we want to do it one chunk at a time.

First let’s get a list of all of the NSF files we want to copy over, this will have a double advantage of giving us an indication of numbers and size etc as well as giving us something that we can actually work through, so that we can do one group at a time,

dir *.nsf /s /b>f:filelist.txt

Once we have the list then the following little script popped in a batch file and with WinRAR installed on the system will give you an exact mimic of your notes folder structure but with each NSF zipped up and in the correct place.

@ECHO OFF
setlocal enableextensions
for /F "tokens=*" %%A in (filelist.txt) do (
    FOR %%i IN ("%%A") DO (
        md D:NSFZIP%%~pi
        "C:Program Files (x86)WinRARRAR.exe" a -r -dh f:NotesZIP%%~pi%%~ni.rar %%A
    )
)

You can then copy them over in whatever method you prefer and unzip as suits you, this method may seem a little Noddy but this is the third time I’ve used it and every time the notes movement has been the easiest part of a migration.

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