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Repair options that you can use to recover if you accidentally make an incorrect Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) member authoritative in a Windows Server 2003 R2 environment

Article ID: 957556 - View products that this article applies to.

INTRODUCTION

You may accidentally make an incorrect Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) member authoritative. This situation may occur in any of the following scenarios:

You designate an authoritative member by using the DfsrAdmin command.
You disable or enable some replication members.
You add a new replication member.

If the data that is marked as authoritative is out of date, the outdated authoritative data may override correct data by using a conflict algorithm. If there are files missing in the authoritative copy, the corresponding files in the nonauthoritative copy are moved to the PreExisting folder.

Some repair options that you can use to recover from this situation are described in the "More information" section.

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MORE INFORMATION

Repair option 1

If you back up the data regularly, you may be able to restore the data from the most recent backup.

Note If you restore data to a volume that hosts a DFSR content set by restoring the whole volume, all DFSR replicas will be synchronized in a nonauthoritative manner.

Repair option 2

If you configured a replication member to replicate on an infrequent schedule, you may be able to restore data from a site on which the replication has not occurred. Then, you can use the Fence method of the DfsrReplicatedFolderInfo Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) class to reset the fence value of the replicated folder.

To do this, follow these steps:

Start the DFS Management (Dfsmgmt.msc) snap-in.
On the Connections tab, right-click each replication connection, and then click Disable. This stops replication on the replicated folders.
Back up the files in the replicated folder on the server that was not replicated and that hosts a correct replica of data.
Reset the fence value of the files and folders in the replicated folder. To do these, follow these steps:
1. Query for the GUID of the replicated folder. To do this, open a command prompt, type or paste the following command, and then press ENTER:
  dfsradmin rf list /rgname:<Replication Group Name> /attr:rfguid
  Note The <Replication Group Name> placeholder represents the actual name of your replication group.
2. Note the GUID in the command output.
3. At the command prompt, type or paste the following command, and then press ENTER:
  wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderinfo.ReplicatedFolderGuid='<Replicated Group GUID>' call fence mode=2 isrecursive=true filepath='<Replicate Folder Path>'
  Note The <Replicated Group GUID> placeholder represents the GUID that you noted in step 4a. The <Replicate Folder Path> placeholder represents the path of the replicated folder.
Enable replication on the replicated group. To do this, on the Connections tab, right-click each replication connection that you disabled in step 2, and then click Enable.