What is the proper way to move a lot of files between shares?

[crankyCowboy]

New to unraid. I initially moved all my movies from a windows rig to unraid. I created a share simply called "movies". Well after doing some reading and asking a ton of questions, I decided I wanted to utilize hardlinks. So I created a new share called /data as trash's guide suggests. Initially I opened Krusader and put the source directory in one pane and the destination in the other, highlighted all my files and said "move to other panel". This removed all of them from the source directory, but they never arrived in the destination. I panicked and posted here. I did notice the files seemed to be still taking up space in my array, so I did some digging and found an "undo" button in Krusader. that seemed to get them back into the original directory. Now I'm pretty gun shy. Can someone please explain how I need to go about moving about 2000 movies from one share to the other. some people have said "share to share is a no no", others have said it's fine, while other's say to copy the files instead of move because moving just changes the "link". I'm so confused (and scared), so I need some input please.

[itimpi]

4 minutes ago, crankyCowboy said:

"share to share is a no no", others have said it's fine

This is fine if both shares are of the same type,  The problem arises when when you mix a disk share and a user share in the same copy/move operation.

[crankyCowboy]

44 minutes ago, itimpi said:

This is fine if both shares are of the same type,  The problem arises when when you mix a disk share and a user share in the same copy/move operation.

Thank you @itimpi. Can you please clarify the difference between a disk share and a user share? I just want to verify I'm not doing what you are suggesting NOT to do.

[itimpi]

1 hour ago, crankyCowboy said:

Thank you @itimpi. Can you please clarify the difference between a disk share and a user share? I just want to verify I'm not doing what you are suggesting NOT to do.

 

A disk Share is one that refers to a physical device (e.g. disk1, cache. poolname) whereas a User Share refers to top level folders on the drives. 

At the Linux/Command Line level the disk shares appear directly under /mnt while the User Shares exist under /mnt/user.  They are also listed separately on the Shares tab.

[Snipe3000]

I'm doing a large move right now between shares using Unraid's built-in file system explorer. Both shares are setup to use the cache pool.

It seems it is doing a copy operation first. I see a message at the bottom of the Move window saying "This copies all the selected sources", which seems strange. This "move" operation is also filling up the cache drive instead of doing the operation directly on the array.

Does all of this sound normal?

[trurl]

12 minutes ago, Snipe3000 said:

Does all of this sound normal?

Yes, move copies from source to destination, then deletes source. Since the destination is a cached share, files go there first.

[Snipe3000]

3 hours ago, trurl said:

Yes, move copies from source to destination, then deletes source. Since the destination is a cached share, files go there first.

Was there a better way for me to do this move, or is this just the way to do it?

[strike]

3 hours ago, Snipe3000 said:

Was there a better way for me to do this move, or is this just the way to do it?

That depends on what your end goal is, and your share settings . Do you want the files to just move to a different share or do you want them to move to different disks as well? If you just want to move the share to a different share and let the files stay on the same disks you can just use krusader or Midnight Commander in CLI and do the move from share to share and it will be instantaneous. IF your share settings includes the same disks of course. If you on share1 have only included disk1 and on share2 you have included only disk2 then it will move disk as well.

 

If you're doing a big move of files between disks you can use the unbalance plugin or just do what you're already doing. Any way you do it it will copy the files to the destination and remove it form the source afterwards. So if your cache drive is to small for the move you could either disable it temporarily or do the move in smaller chunks. Either way it will take the same time to get the files to the other disks regardless if you're using cache or not. Enabled cache will only delay the move to the array until you invoke mover or it runs automatically. 

Edited January 1, 2023 by strike

[trurl]

12 hours ago, strike said:

IF your share settings includes the same disks of course.

If you use MC or cli, Linux doesn't know anything about share settings, so will "repath" a file to the same disk regardless of share settings.

[strike]

30 minutes ago, trurl said:

If you use MC or cli, Linux doesn't know anything about share settings, so will "repath" a file to the same disk regardless of share settings.

Thanks for correcting me. I kinda knew that, but forgot about it.

[TheUNRAIDMan]

On 1/1/2023 at 10:08 AM, trurl said:

If you use MC or cli, Linux doesn't know anything about share settings, so will "repath" a file to the same disk regardless of share settings.

Hi 

 

So what does one do if data on certain shares are on CERTAIN drives? How does one handle that? 

[trurl]

You can work directly with the disks in Dynamix File manager.