This has already been answered sufficiently , but I thought I ' d add my two cents as well . If you read Microsoft ' s documentation , they recommend prestaging files whenever possible . Programs like robocopy allow you to control the copy process to whatever level of detail you wish . If you don ' t throttle it , Robocopy will use quite a bit of your system ' s resources , but will copy the files pretty quickly . While DFS is pretty reliable , it is not built for speed and will take much longer for the initial copy . Once your content is staged , DFS will do its thing and sync them by updating the newest versions of your files . I ' ve done it both ways and , even over a network , Robocopy does a much better faster job of initially copying the content .