Moving 3TB of NTFS files from on-prem file server to Azure server - what is best method for transferring

We are moving our on-prem Windows file server with 2.7TB of NTFS files to Azure (we have 100 mb/s VPN site to site connection to Azure)

What would people recommend best way to transfer our files keeping the NTFS permissions intact?

We can recreate the approx 20 network shares on the files server but do not want to recreate the 300+ user NTFS directory permissions.

We created an Azure server and setup DFS file replication between the on-prem server (a 2008R2 Windows Server with 3 drives virtualized in VMware)but we have have had problems getting this to work, it works for small number of files but does not do all of them.

Has anybody used ez copy or Azure export services (send Azure a hard drive) can either of these methods keep the NTFS permissions intact?


I would use robocopy /mir /copyall /z to preserve ACLs.

Please also consider that robocopy can be used to pre-seed DFSR to speedup initial replication


With that much data at that speed, sneakernet is likely your best bet. I don't have first-hand experience with azure export services, but I would be very surprised if they didn't have a way of preserving metadata including acl information.