The present invention provides for a method and a computer system for preserving filehandles after a file system migration on a distributed file system. One embodiment of the invention includes maintaining a cache of each filehandle provided to a client from a source file server. When files are migrated from the source file server to the destination file server, the cache entries are transferred from the source file server to the destination file server. The cache entries are then updated to link the source file server filehandle of each cached data object to the file attributes of the data object now existing on the destination file server. When a client subsequently attempts to access a file by using a previously valid filehandle, the cache will translate the source file server filehandle into the file attributes of the object on the destination file server, allowing the file to be located without receiving a filehandle expiration error.