DFS and Branch Offices

The Distributed File System (DFS) allows administrators to manage the replication of data among servers in branch offices and servers in a central office. To replicate files between a branch and central office, an organization will use DFS to create a replication group, which is a set of member servers that will participate in the replication. Then the organization must determine which folders contain the files to be replicated or synchronized among the member servers.

In this illustration, one replication group spans the branch and central office. Each office has a single member server, with a replicated folder: Proposals. The process of replication happens as follows:

(1) When a file in the Proposals folder in the branch is changed, the change is noted in a journal maintained by DFS. The member servers compare the data in the journals to know which files need to be replicated. When the file is closed, DFS Replication builds a compressed representation of the changes in a staging file in the Staging folder on the branch office member server.