A little over 2 years ago we ran into a problem where changes made to files on the master server would appear to get deleted. After dealing with this for months, and losing quite a bit of man hours as a result of recreating the lost work, it was decided to halt DFS replication. Since then we've been using robocopy.
Fast forward to 2013: No one ever really troubleshot this, and since I'm essentially the only one who maintains the software, I decided to try my hand at it. Since the data was already seeded by way of robocopy, I figured it wouldn't take too long or be a big deal for DFS to walk the data & replicate. To be safe, I created a new namespace, added all the folder targets then began enabling replication. During the process I made sure the local server was the 'master' server. Aside from open handle & cache space issues, things have been going fine. Or so I thought...
In the past 2 weeks I made several changes to various files on the master DFS. Mostly adding new software packages, updating existing .reg and .bat files. A day or two later I noticed the packages were missing and the edits I made to the files were gone. I scoured the locations on each of the member servers, just in case, but everything was gone & the edits had 'reverted'. So I re-created everything. A day or two later, same thing: it was all gone. After recreating everything again, I kept explorer open on one of the directories in question and within a few hours my changes vanished. (Now, I'm the *only* desktop architect/application specialist or whatever you want to call it, so its not like a counterpart in California or London is doing the same and we're tripping over each other!) I did some research, found a script by Ned Pyle that I used to 'recover' the data, and after going through it, I moved it back to where it needed to be. This is great, saved me loads of time but I'm still back at square one: The DFS seems to be deleting files (or identifying them as conflicts)& I don't know why! (If I add a file then copy via robocopy & enable DFS, there should be no changes since all files are identical, right?)
So, I'm in need of some assistance in troubleshooting why this is happening. (e.g.: Did DFS determine these were conflicts, or it somehow determined they should have been deleted because they don't exist on server X?)