I was faced with the same problem about 2 years ago, however I was only
given a 4 hour outage to complete the migration to a new server. 
I ended up buying PeerSync (which worked very well for us. 

I ran the sync during the night to get all the data over to the new
server (took 3 days)
Then on the outage, I disabled all the shares to make sure no data
changed and all the open files could be copied. Than one last sync was
performed.

We found this approach worked well as we still had the old production
box in an operational state in case something went wrong, and allowed
testing of links (excel, etc).

I'm sure there are many other products like Peersync available, that
just happen to be the one we chose.


The Virtualnodename is another solution I looked at, however our problem
was 4 hours was not enough time for me to take the server out of
production, backup the data, restore the data to the new server, test
and get it back in production.


: : Greg Yuzik : :

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Sharpe, Jerri
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 1:19 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Backup vs. Archive - Replacing a Windows Server

We have also wanted to do restore testing to different server levels and
this is a good time to attempt it.
The direct copy they have tried has failed for some reason. I wasn't
involved in that process. We just had a teamlead 
leave. Our TSM lead is on vacation.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

JES

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU]On Behalf Of
Mark Stapleton
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 1:28 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Backup vs. Archive - Replacing a Windows Server


From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Sharpe, Jerri
> We have a Windows 2003 x32 Server thatis running
>out of disk space. We want to use TSM to copy all the data onto a new
>server which is
>a Windows 2003 x64 Server. What is the best way to do this? Backup vs.
>archive? If backup, what type will be best?
>Can anyone offer suggestions?

I'm going to ask the obvious question: why not just copy files from one
machine directly to the other?

--
Mark Stapleton (mark.s AT evolvingsol DOT com)
Senior TSM consultant