Blogs

There are two ways to get user profile data on your farm from an existing farm in SharePoint 2010. The first is to consume the User Profile Service of the host farm, but this causes issues if you want to host a My Site host (that contain personal sites) on the consuming farm. The second way is to use the Replication Engine. The Replication Engine uses audiences and trusted My Site Hosts to determine which farm “owns” the particular set of user profile data. Rather than having a publisher and consumer, each farm will be responsible for a set of users and their profile data. The Replication Engine can also be used to keep data in synch with SharePoint 2007 data. Replicating will also let you create a My Site Hosts that contains personal sites.

Getting Started
1. Download the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=718447d8-0814-427a-81c3-c9c3d84c456e&displaylang=enand install it on at least one server. If you want to push data in more than one direction you will need to install it on other servers. It is pretty small (a few megabytes) and it will install the Replication Engine.

2. Create your audiences and Trusted My Site Host entries on all the servers involved. This can cause some serious problems if you don’t set them up correctly.

3. Refer to the online documentation for the User Profile Replication Engine that can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc663011.aspx. The 2010 version is a PowerShell window with a few commands. Basically you can start and stop incremental replication, do full replications, and get a list of profile properties.

Now you can start replicating data. Before you do BACKUP YOUR PROFILE DATABASES (probably Profile DB) on all servers involved. Also, if you are doing a full replication you probably want to turn off the smtp service if it is installed, otherwise you will get colleague notifications being sent.

Hope that is enough to get you going.
Cheers,
@SharePointNinja