drive transfers

[Michael E. Smith]

Hey there,

I’d like to transfer a bunch of hard drives ranging from 20 to 500 gb to my freenas box. The drives will be local to a linux box (a lot of the drives are ext3), attached to to the gigabit network and freenas via copper.

How would one best do this? Should I consider transferring each drive as a single image?

Accuracy, speed, fault-tolerance/notification, usability once complete (as in, an image might need to be either mounted or further processed within the freenas box to get the data accessible), and ability to be run reasonably unattended are all considerations.

Perhaps this is more of a linux question than a freenas one, but I figured I’d run it by you guys.

If it’s helpful, I’m on freenas 9.10 stable.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Michael

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Please clarify. What is your goal?

Do you simply need access to the data that's currently on the drives, or do you need to be able to mount them as disk images?

 

[Michael E. Smith]

Please clarify. What is your goal?

Do you simply need access to the data that's currently on the drives, or do you need to be able to mount them as disk images?

Ultimately I need to access the data. I'm moving soon and want to consolidate all these drives, so *if* transferring as images was faster or maore pragmatic in the short term, I'd consider that and just deal with the images after the move. I really don't know if there's any advantage to it.

So, for me, data access is necessary, images are not.

Thanks,

Michael

 

[Ericloewe]

Ultimately I need to access the data. I'm moving soon and want to consolidate all these drives, so *if* transferring as images was faster or maore pragmatic in the short term, I'd consider that and just deal with the images after the move. I really don't know if there's any advantage to it.

Not unless it's a really large collection of minuscule files. And even then, a tarball would make more sense.

Just copy the files over to the share, after you've mounted it on your Linux box. Optionally, tarball them up into larger chunks.

 

[DrKK]

I agree. Open up a share on the FreeNAS, and the push your Linux files to it. Or something more or less equivalent...like ftp.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Consider transferring the files using rsync. The benefits would be that each transferred file is checksummed to ensure that the destination matches the source, and that an interrupted transfer can be resumed.