The time has came, it is now time to migrate one of my File Servers from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise to a new server with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. I want to migrate all my shares including share and folder permissions. To minimize time spent on this project I had to find a tool that could do it for me fairly easily. I know that there are tools you can purchase online that can do this for you, like for example: “Secure Copy”, but who wants to spend money those days for such a tools, and as always there are for sure alternative free tools somewhere out there to do it for you. After googling for a minute, I found a tool that Microsoft created for us for this scenario: “Microsoft Server Migration Toolkit“.
You can install it on your new Windows Server 2008 and run a File Server Migration Wizard that will guide you thru the whole process. One thing to mention is that, this tool is not perfect, unless I was maybe doing something wrong 
When you add your shares, from a specific server, you have to make sure that for each share you check, the appropriate “Target Volume” is set, including share name and share location. If you will not do it, the shares copied will not be as identical as on your original server. Correcting each share might take some time, it all depends on how many of them you have.
So If you don’t want to bother to copy folders, and share them again, and set permissions on those folder again manually for a few hours, you can use that tool and save some time.
File Server Migration Wizard
Or… You can always read this HOWTO
.