tool for comparison migrated data

All,

BeyondCompare is a great and cheap tool (no association with EMC) for comparing data source to target if you choose to use a migration tool that cannot do this natively and give you reports on it.  For comparing permissions, the best method i've found outside of commercial migration software is to:

1. Use emcacl to dump the permissions on the source saving the output to a .txt file

2. Use emcacl to dump the permissions on the target saving the output to a .txt file

3. Use beyond compare or another diff utility to compare the 2 text files.  There will likely be some discrepancies even if it's just from local users and groups, so understanding the output and what can safely be ignored is key.

This is by no means elegant or fast but it gets the desired level of assurance that everything made it across as it should.

Otherwise Dobiminer from Datadobi can do md5 hashing on every single source/target file during it's copy runs.  So can emcopy but with one key distinction.  MD5 hashing file content during a migration has a huge performance penalty.  With emcopy in the full and then every single incremental it has to hash every single file on source and target, which takes forever.  Because dobiminer keeps track of this information for later reporting, it still hashes all the files during the first full copy, but in the incrementals it only hashes newly copied or changed files, which decreased the performance impact a ton.  They call this feature "read-back verification" and it is enabled by default in the 3.5 and later releases to ensure data integrity.  There are other 3rd party utilities that can do this as well, I'm just commenting on the one I'm the most familiar with.

Chris Klosterman

Advisory Solution Architect

EMC Enablement Team