To summarize what they are using to migrate gigabytes of data is:
- 5 hours before the actual move, they make a full backup of their data in the database (SQL Server 2000)
- They use RoboCopy in triplicate to move the more than 20gb of data from one server to another
- They restore the data
- They do a differential of the last few hours of data
The entire process takes about two hours to fully migrate. The reason why they have allocated an additional 3 hours is so that if there is any problems during the migration, they have enough time to analyze the data and run a complete migration again.
Some of the things that they are looking at and testing is Virtualization using Hyper-V or VMWare to break their dependence on hardware.