Copying 3TB of data to FreeNAS system

[Rilo Ravestein]

Hi guys,

I have an external storage that i would hardly call a NAS of which i want to tranfer about 3TB of data to my FreeNAS system. What would be the best way to do this? I can setup SAMBA, FTP, NFS on the old box, but that is pretty much it.

Of course i can mount all shares to my laptop and copy everything, but for obvious reasons, i don want to do that.

Any help and recommendations would be appreciated!

 

[ipsum]

How about rsync via SSH?

Or lftp?

 

[Rilo Ravestein]

I cannot install anything on the other NAS. If i understand correctly, both the host and the client would need to have some rsync software installed, correct?

 

[danb35]

Do you have shell access on the old box? Can you mount remote shares on that box? Though I'm sure remote shares could be mounted on FreeNAS, I'm not quite sure how.

 

[depasseg]

I would mount the remote device as an NFS share locally on the freenas and then run Rsync locally between the NFS mount point and the datastore.

On your FreeNAS:

Code:

# mount old-nas-server:/foldername /mnt/oldnas

The files and directories in /foldername will now be available on the FreeNAS in the /mnt/oldnas directory.

Then configure rsync on the FreeNAS between /mnt/oldnas and /mnt/whatever-new-folder

 

[danb35]

Seems that rsync run this way would be awfully slow, or at least that was my experience trying to rsync from a SMB-mounted share. I'd think cp -a would be quite a bit faster.

 

[depasseg]

Agree it won't be a barn-burner performance, but it is only done once, and in case it gets interrupted, it can recover.

 

[Rilo Ravestein]

Thanks! Quite a simple solution to just mount the external storage NFS share locally and rsync between the thares. Not sure why i did not think of that myself...

 

[depasseg]

And to Danb35's point, you could just use cp if rsync is too slow.

Good luck!

 

[Rilo Ravestein]

Yes, but then I would not have the option to continue/recover if something goes wrong.

 

[pix]

i've been using the ftp service on FreeNAS and filezilla ftp client to transfer long hauls of data. especially when transferring 10Gb+ single files. Using options in filezilla like "overwrite file only if source is newer and different
filesize" helps keep things in sync during the inital transfer; especially if you need to stop a transfer midway through or if your source decides to disconnect itself (ie. as is common with external USB storage) . filezilla offers "resuming" of files. the reason i put it in quotes is because some files just don't like to be resumed :) .

after the transfer is done you can run a directory checksum program to make sure all things are correct.

in my case 1.5 Tb of data was looking at something like 12-14 hours to transfer over a 100MB router connection local. don't laugh only reason i have this router is because it's 8 lan ports and it supports dd-wrt or i'd go back to my 1Gb 4port :p .