Transfer all files to external drive

[Axe]

Hi,

Can you please advise how I can attach a 3TB NTFS formatted external drive to FREENAS and copy all my data from my drive (2 x 3TB drives which are mirrored) so that I can then connect the external to my PC.

I kindly ask if you can walk me through the steps or forward me to the guides. There's just too much information for me to go through on the web.

I am new to 'terminal' etc and have been reading on rsync etc but it is quite involved for me at the present and I do not wish to lose any of my data should I mess up my NAS and hence wish a backup first of all my data (almost 3TB full spanning many years).

I don't want to spend many hours transferring files from my NAS to my external drive (USB3) via PC. As it was, it took ages to transfer the files from my PC (not the external drive) to the NAS.

Many thanks,

 

[SweetAndLow]

Plug external drive into your windows computer, access your freenas system using smb/cifs and copy the files over the network. No reason to connect it straight to freenas since your bottle neck is usb. It will transfer at the same speed. Freenas doesn't really write ntfs easily.

 

[Axe]

Plug external drive into your windows computer, access your freenas system using smb/cifs and copy the files over the network. No reason to connect it straight to freenas since your bottle neck is usb. It will transfer at the same speed. Freenas doesn't really write ntfs easily.

Thank you, will take ages then!

 

[danb35]

No reason to connect it straight to freenas since your bottle neck is usb.

With USB3, no, the bottleneck will be the LAN. But even so, as you say, FreeNAS doesn't safely/reliably write to NTFS.

@Axe, does the backup drive have to be NTFS? If it can be a ZFS pool instead, it'd be easy enough to use ZFS replication to copy all the data over.

 

[Axe]

@ danb 35
Yes, since I want Windows to be able to read the files (that is connect the drive directly to my PC).

 

[danb35]

In that case, I think @SweetAndLow has your best answer.

 

[gpsguy]

In addition to what SweetAndLow said, you might want to use a program like Robocopy to "copy" the files.

Search the forum for robocopy for examples. The forum search will probably turn up alternatives that might be easier for you to use.