Copying NTFS disks to Unraid simaltaneously

[wibble]

I plan on moving from 10 NTFS disks under W10 to Unraid. I have a few empty disks to start out with and I will add the parity disk after everything I want is copied over. I understand that I can mount these using the Unassigned Devices plugin and transfer via Unraid, use a Docker file manager, or use a VM to copy over the NTFS disks. (With the Docker or VM approach would I be accessing disk shares or mounting the Unraid disks directly?)

 

Is there a 'best' way to do this with simultaneous disk>disk transfers in parallel? I don't need to have a GUI, but it has been forever since I used screen or anything like that to have multiple things going on in a terminal.

 

I also came across an ominous warning and I'd like to know more.

"A better way to do it is to use the "unassigned devices" plug in with your NTFS disks directly attached to your unraid server, fire up MC (Midnight commander) in a putty terminal, and copy the data over locally. [b]This has to be done in a particular fashion or you could screw up your shares. You can find instructions on the unraid forum for this. I'd encourage you to seek it out, it's definitely your fastest bet.[/b]"

 

Thank you

Edited March 28, 2021 by wibble

[JonathanM]

Are the NTFS disks all simple basic volumes?

[wibble]

14 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Are the NTFS disks all simple basic volumes?

 

Yes.

[JonathanM]

Do you have full backups elsewhere of all data you don't want to lose?

[wibble]

1 minute ago, jonathanm said:

Do you have full backups elsewhere of all data you don't want to lose?

 

This is all media. Not backed up, certainly don't want to lose it, but not to the same degree as precious memes or documents,

[JonathanM]

Array disks will appear at /mnt/diskX where X is the data slot number the disk is assigned to. Foreign disks mounted using UD will show up at the path shown in the UD GUI. You can use midnight commander (mc) at the command line to get a text based GUI for navigating and copying. If you want multiple simultaneous copies going, you can have multiple consoles, the easiest way is using the screen command that is available in nerd tools.

 

The warning about messing up shares is because of how disks and user shares interact. The user shares are a synthetic mix of all the root folders on all the disks, and show up at /mnt/user.

 

If you want a user share named Movies, you can create a folder /mnt/disk1/Movies and also /mnt/disk2/Movies, and the contents of both folders will show up in /mnt/user/Movies.

[wibble]

So messing up shares would mean things aren't laid out as I might prefer, or (from a quick glance at the manual) resolvable collisions if there are objects of the same name at the same level, rather than anything destructive/catastrophic?

 

I do need to have a proper read up on user shares and allocation methods.

[JonathanM]

8 hours ago, wibble said:

So messing up shares would mean things aren't laid out as I might prefer, or (from a quick glance at the manual) resolvable collisions if there are objects of the same name at the same level, rather than anything destructive/catastrophic?

 

I do need to have a proper read up on user shares and allocation methods.

As long as you work exclusively with direct disk paths, yes, that is the extent of the damage you can do.

 

The real issue that can lose data occurs when you mix /mnt/user paths with direct disk paths, where the exact same physical file shows up in two paths, so moving a file can result in the OS erasing the content of that file.

 

Normally we tell people to avoid disk shares and work exclusively with user shares, but you want to do multiple disk copies at once, so disk to disk is easier to deal with, and as long as you understand how to make user shares by creating root disk folders you should be fine.

 

You can view and read your user shares over the network during this process so you see how things act. Any root disk folder automatically becomes a user share with default public access. You can update that however you wish in the GUI on the shares tab.