I work with Microsoft DFS service for many years, and one of the scariest things about DFS was initial replication – tools to monitor and troubleshoot replication were not good or helpful enough and things often went south if there is something unusual in the file set (like extremely long file names with special signs). And time it takes to finish initial replication is also troublesome – it take days to finish up.

Recently, I got to setup another DFS from scratch, and initial seed was not something I was happy about. But ever since Windows Server 2012 R2 there are some changes with replication and DFS.