Copying data from old SMB file server directly over NICs

[lonelyzinc]

I have an old file server that I want to copy a large amount of data over from, figured I would use available 10G ethernet ports to connect them directly. I don't have root access on the old server, will have to connect to it over SMB.

The first challenge would be mounting the other machine as an SMB connection on FreeNAS, the next would be copying the data over. Would rsync offer the best performance in this case? Has anyone done something like this before?

 

[anodos]

I have an old file server that I want to copy a large amount of data over from, figured I would use available 10G ethernet ports to connect them directly. I don't have root access on the old server, will have to connect to it over SMB.

The first challenge would be mounting the other machine as an SMB connection on FreeNAS, the next would be copying the data over. Would rsync offer the best performance in this case? Has anyone done something like this before?

The FreeNAS SMB client is limited to SMB 1. If possible data should be transferred protocol to protocol (if the remote server has SMB shares, then you should use the SMB protocol to transfer the files to SMB shares on the FreeNAS server). This is to ensure that metadata and permissions are preserved.

 

[seanm]

I have an old file server that I want to copy a large amount of data over from

I'm in the middle of doing exactly this. It's an old Mac OS 10.11 server. I connect *from* the Mac *to* the FreeNAS over SMB and 'sudo cp -a' the files over. cp warns about not being able to set permissions, but that's actually normal. The only data loss I'm aware of is that 'creation dates' aren't preserved (this is fixed in 11.3b1).

The speed of the copy isn't great, it doesn't even saturate my gigabit ethernet. Not a big deal for me, I only have a few terabytes, so am doing a bit each weekend.

 

[lonelyzinc]

I'm in the middle of doing exactly this. It's an old Mac OS 10.11 server. I connect *from* the Mac *to* the FreeNAS over SMB and 'sudo cp -a' the files over. cp warns about not being able to set permissions, but that's actually normal. The only data loss I'm aware of is that 'creation dates' aren't preserved (this is fixed in 11.3b1).

The speed of the copy isn't great, it doesn't even saturate my gigabit ethernet. Not a big deal for me, I only have a few terabytes, so am doing a bit each weekend.

Normally what I would do (and still probably will do) is use CCC on a Mac, connect to the two shares there. Carbon Copy Cloner is essentially a GUI for rsync. I don't have the speed tests in, but I don't think it's that slow. I think it creates multiple instances of rsync to speed it up, so might be worth testing out on your Mac.

I figured since FreeNAS has some SMB features I could eliminate the middle computer, maybe speed it up a little.