Roles live in the Backingstore - surprise to us.

Bowker

Scenario: Upgrading from TS 6.5 on one server to 7.2.1 on another. As it turns out the backing stores are in the "same format". We took advantage of this by doing an XCOPY of the backingstore from the old server to the new server.

To our surprise, things didn't quite work as expected. Specifically the security on the content on the Y: drive needed to be tweaked. We spent about a month in Parallel Production just to verify we got all the kinks out. Those kinks included creating all the TS groups, roles, permissions, workflows ... etc.

Well when "production migration weekend" rolled around we renamed our parallel testing backing stores and XCOPY'd down all the current production data and poof, nothing worked. All the roles setup for all the groups went away.

Lesson learned - roles and the permissions for content stored in the backingstore is stored in the backingstore, not in some other repository. In hindsight it makes perfect sense.

This is a friendly "watch out" if you attempt a similar migration.