Forum FAQ: Temporary files are not replicated by DFSR

• Monday, February 22, 2010 7:58 AM

   

   
  

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  Summary

   

  Someone may notice that DFS Replication (DFSR) is not replicating certain files even if most of the other files can be replicated successfully; the reason is that the temporary attribute is set on these un-replicated file.

   

  By design, DFSR does not replicate files if they have the temporary attribute set on them, and it cannot be configured to replicate it. The reason DFSR does not replicate files with the temporary attribute set is that they are considered short-lived files that you would never actually want to replicate. Using the temporary attribute on a file keeps that file in memory and saves on disk I/O. Therefore applications can use it on short-lived files to improve performance.

   

  Symptom

   

  Supposed you have setup DFS shares and DFS replication group between 2 or more DFS replication servers. Most of the content under the DFS target folder can be replicated to another DFS server; however, only a few of files cannot be replicated.

   

  When you use Fsutil to check the un-replicated file, you will see Temporary Attribute on the File.

  For example: Checking the Temporary Attribute on a File

  fsutil usn readdata c:\data\test.txt

   

  Major Version : 0x2
  Minor Version : 0x0
  FileRef# : 0x0021000000002350
  Parent FileRef# : 0x0003000000005f5e
  Usn : 0x000000004d431000
  Time Stamp : 0x0000000000000000 12:00:00 AM 1/1/1601
  Reason : 0x0
  Source Info : 0x0
  Security Id : 0x5fb
  File Attributes : 0x120
  File Name Length : 0x10
  File Name Offset : 0x3c
  FileName : test.txt

  File Attributes is a bitmask that indicates which attributes are set. In the above example, 0x120 indicates the temporary attribute is set because that is 0x100 and 0x20 (Archive) = 0x120.

  Here are the possible values:

  READONLY	0x1
  HIDDEN	0x2
  SYSTEM	0x4
  DIRECTORY	0x10
  ARCHIVE	0x20
  DEVICE	0x40
  NORMAL	0x80
  TEMPORARY	0x100
  SPARSE_FILE	0x200
  REPARSE_POINT	0x400
  COMPRESSED	0x800
  OFFLINE	0x1000
  NOT_CONTENT_INDEXED	0x2000
  ENCRYPTED	0x4000

   

  Resolution

   

  Removing the Temporary Attribute from Multiple Files with Powershell

   

  To remove the temporary attribute, we can use PowerShell which can be installed from here. After PowerShell is installed, please open Powershell prompt (Start, Run, Powershell or from the Programs menu) and run this command to remove the temporary attribute from all files in the specified directory, including subdirectories (in this example, D:\Data):

   

  Get-childitem D:\Data -recurse | ForEach-Object -process {if (($_.attributes -band 0x100) -eq 0x100) {$_.attributes = ($_.attributes -band 0xFEFF)}}

   

  Note: If you don’t want it to work against subdirectories just remove the -recurse parameter.

   

  More Information

   

  DFSR Does Not Replicate Temporary Files

  http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2008/11/11/dfsr-does-not-replicate-temporary-files.aspx

   

  Applies to

   

  Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2
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