Housekeeping...always good to do but never enough time!
I recently had to look over a client's VM system which had been vMotioned and generally updated through various generations of hardware and software, starting in 2005. (It's now 2022..)
It was all working fine but I noticed that the 'conflict and deleted' directories had many tens of thousands of old files in them, which stretched back to 2005. Time for housekeeping..
Best way to do this is:
Find the GUID of the replicated folders.. and then clean it, both using WMIC. So open an elevated CMD prompt on the DFSR server and type...
WMIC.EXE /namespace:rootmicrosoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderconfig get replicatedfolderguid,replicatedfoldername
This will return something like this:
ReplicatedFolderGuid ReplicatedFolderName
53C4FD72-A87C-46A3-9E73-4724AE3E79CA Data
2F07DCAF-05D0-497C-BA80-210AEE8FDED8 Data
Then type:
WMIC.EXE /namespace:rootmicrosoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderinfo where "replicatedfolderguid='2F07DCAF-05D0-497C-BA80-210AEE8FDED8'" call cleanupconflictdirectory
This returns:
Executing (xxx-DATA-01rootmicrosoftdfs:DfsrReplicatedFolderInfo.ReplicatedFolderGuid="2F07DCAF-05D0-497C-BA80-210AEE8FDED8")->cleanupconflictdirectory()
Method execution successful.
Out Parameters:
instance of __PARAMETERS
{
ReturnValue = 0;
};
and if you look at the offending directory, over 10 or 15 minutes, it will be cleared out.
Details in this Microsoft Blog.