XRAID Upgrade - added drives

Question

In looking around for answers on "how to copy or move data from one RAID Array to another while preserving ACL's and metadata" most answers I found were a bit vague. I'm hoping my experience will be of help to someone when they go looking for the same information.
There are many methods to copying data from RAID to RAID - this post has some good ideas:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2434030&#2434030
This is how I ended up moving my set of data for an XRAID attached to a G5 xserve running 10.4.7
I have previously used ditto on other servers to move the data but ended up having to re-enable all my sharepoints afterwards which was a huge pain. This time I tried rsync (failed) and then asr.
I first ran rsync -aEv from the first volume over to the next volume but got a lot of "file has vanished" errors - I found this explanation:
http://listserv.cuny.edu/Scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0607&L=macenterprise&T=0&O=A&P=256 15
I thought I'd give ASR a try before going through ditto which I know will work (problem being having to re-share everything). Don't get me wrong, ditto keeps all the file sharing settings but you have to go into the workgroup manager and click the share boxes to get them to be shared again (maybe I missed something when doing it but that's what happened to me last time I had to do this).
I had read that ASR didn't work properly in 10.4.6 here:
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/asr-broken-in-1046/
but seeing as 10.4.7 had not really been discussed I figured I'd give it a whirl.
I had roughly 700GB of data to move from a RAID 5 over 250GB drives onto a RAID5 on 500GB drives. First I disabled Filesharing. Then I used asr from the command line:
#asr -source /XRAID1 -target /NewXRAID -erase
I chose to erase the target so I could get block copy going to allow the fastest copy possible. It took about 5 hours - give or take - I wasn't paying much attention to it...
I came back to the finished copy, ejected the smaller volume and re-enabled filesharing. To my dismay nothing appeared to be shared. Workgroup manager was asking me to remove sharepoints and re-add them saying they couldn't be found. I decided not to do that. Instead, I stopped filesharing services and restarted the server. This time I ejected both volumes - opened Disk Utility and mounted the larger XRAID volume by itself. I then started filesharing and IT WORKED! All my sharepoints were there and all the ACL's appeared to be functioning correctly. I've logged in as several different users and everything seems as it should. I also checked alias's I made on a remote desktop machine previous to starting to see if they worked and they do.
Now, having two volumes with identical names can be a problem so to be safe I stopped Filesharing and mounted the smaller drive and re-named it (I'm keeping it as a backup just in case things go to pot when it goes live on Tuesday..). I then restarted the server again, left all drives mounted and started Filesharing again. The correct volume is shared and everything looks good.
So if you need to move all your files from a smaller RAID to a larger one ASR in 10.4.7 seems to do the trick.
Cheers,
Simon

Answer 1

Problem:
Today we have reports that files are missing from the new RAID. Sure enough there are some files that ought to be there that aren't so I'm going to scrap this and go back to the original volume and do a ditto either tonight or on Friday night when I have more time to set the shares straight.
Oh well so much for that.
Simon
The RAID is running the latest firmware and the server is running 10.4.7 on a Dual G5 XSERVE 4gb ram.