Thanks for your reply and ideas. Unfortunately, the results are the same. I wish it were that easy! I have tried that before and included the archiving because I was going to experiment with using archiving and comparing to not using it.
I had a theory that in trying to reuse the same replica name (after unregistering from both parent and child and deleting the child gdb), that possibly something behind-the-scenes was not getting deleted or cleared properly when the Unregister happened.
So I tried it with a brand new, never before used replica name and the above suggestion of taking off the last four parameters, to no avail. I agree that the documentation is far from complete and I wasn't sure if the archiving flag was optional or not. The default is not to use it anyway, so I just left it off.
I have tried everything I could think of. Curious that it did work going from our Workgroup SDE server to file geodatabases on my C: Drive using a new replica name, but if I unregister and delete the output/child gdbs and try again, it will fail with ERROR 000582. Also, I just tried with a new and unique replica name from our Workgroup SDE to the external NAS drive (connected as UNC path with admin credentials) and got the same ERROR 000582. It seems like I have tried every possible thing that could be the issue and am no closer to figuring out what is causing the problem.
Does anyone know of a way to tell why it's failing at this point?:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.2\arcpy\arcpy\management.py", line 800, in CreateReplica
retval = convertArcObjectToPythonObject(gp.CreateReplica_management(*gp_fixargs((in_data, in_type, out_geodatabase, out_name, access_type, initial_data_sender, expand_feature_classes_and_tables, reuse_schema, get_related_data, geometry_features, archiving), True)))
File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.2\arcpy\arcpy\geoprocessing\_base.py", line 498, in <lambda>
return lambda *args: val(*gp_fixargs(args, True))
ExecuteError: ERROR 000582: Error occurred during execution.