First of all, I would like to say thanks to everyone who has helped me better understand and use unRaid.

 

Now, as for my question, I was wondering what is the best way to copy files from unRaid onto another hard drive? I have a friend who would like to have a copy of some of my data from my unRaid server, but it will likely end up being a rather large amount and I'm wondering what would be the fastest way to do this. If he brought over an external drive and plugged it into my desktop, then copying them that way would first force me to pull them over the network (my network is only 100Mbps), onto my desktop's RAM, and then finally onto his drive. Is there a more direct approach I can use? It would be great if I could somehow add a hard drive of his to my server and then push them over that way.

 

Thanks for any help.

Have a look at S.N.A.P: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5904.0

 

It allows you to hotplug a usb harddrive and mount it so that it will appear as a non array device allowing you to copy your files onto the array directly.

If your not into that I would recommend TeraCopy

http://www.codesector.com/index.php

I read about SNAP, but I thought it was only good for mounting hard disks and hosting them as a share. If I were to view the shares from my desktop and them drag them over, would that first copy the files to my desktop's ram, or would it all be contained within unRaid? Actually, I guess it's not unreasonable to assume that would work. I was looking at SNAP last night and for some reason that idea didn't come to me...

 

Ok, I'm going to try out both of those suggestions, starting with SNAP. Thanks a lot, guys.

Ok, so I set up SNAP and everything seems to be working well except for one thing. How do you get read/write access to the mounted drive? When I add drives, I am only able to read their contents, but I cannot delete any files or write new files onto it.

 

I am hoping there is a simple way to do this, like some sort of command.

 

Thanks for any help.

Ok, so I set up SNAP and everything seems to be working well except for one thing. How do you get read/write access to the mounted drive? When I add drives, I am only able to read their contents, but I cannot delete any files or write new files onto it.

 

I am hoping there is a simple way to do this, like some sort of command.

 

Thanks for any help.

Unfortunately, the NTFS driver built into unRAID is read-only.  It has no capability to write files or to create new files on the plugged in drive.  SNAP probably has no built-in way to allow you to write to the newly mounted drive because of that.

 

To be able to both read and write an NTFS drive you must install the NTFS-3G driver.   It has full read/write capability.

 

Easiest way to install NTFS-3G is through unMENU's package manager.   Once installed, unMENU's disk manager will let you mount the NTFS drive so you can access it in "mc" (so you can copy the files locally rather than over the LAN) and also share the NTFS drive on the LAN so you can access it through file-explorer if desired.  

 

Once NFTS-3G is installed unMENU will also allow you to then take it out of read-only mode after being mounted.   All of these are possible with the click of a button on the unMENU disk manager's screen.

 

If you do not wish to use unMENU's screen to assist you you can do it all on the command line.

 

# create the /boot/packages directory to hold the new downloaded driver  (only need to this once.  It will remain when you reboot)

mkdir -p /boot/packages

 

# download the driver  Type this all on one line. (only need to do this once, the file will be in /boot/packages from then on)

wget  -O /boot/packages/ntfs-3g-2010.3.6-i486-1.txz  http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-13.1/slackware/a/ntfs-3g-2010.3.6-i486-1.txz

 

# install the driver  (This will need to be re-installed every time you reboot the server)

installpkg /boot/packages/ntfs-3g-2010.3.6-i486-1.txz

 

# make a mount point for the drive to be mounted.  This an just an empty directory. It can be named anything you like.

# for this example, I used "ntfs_disk"  (this will need to be re-created every time you reboot the server)

mkdir /mnt/ntfs_disk

 

# plug in the USB drive you want to write to.

 

# determine the device name of the plugged in NTFS disk.  (This will need to be done each time you plug in a USB drive)

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

 

# you want to mount the partition on the NTFS disk, so  the device name will end with a digit (a 1 or 2 most likely,

# depending on how many partitions exist on the disk.   It will probably be something like sdX1  

# where X will depend on the other disks in your server )

mount -t ngfs-3g  -o umask=111,dmask=000 -t ntfs /dev/sdX1 /mnt/ntfs_disk

(sdX1 will need to be changed on above line to be the correct device name as discovered by the prior "ls -l" command)

# once mounted, you can access the files on the disk at /mnt/ntfs_disk.   If you wish to share them on the LAN

# you need to do one more step.  you need to add a few lines to the /etc/samba/smb-shares.conf file and have SAMBA re-read it to use the newly added lines.  (This will need to be done each time you reboot the server)

# you can do that by typing

echo '[uSB DRIVE]' >>/etc/samba/smb-shares.conf

echo ' path = /mnt/ntfs_disk' >>/etc/samba/smb-shares.conf

echo ' read only = No' >>/etc/samba/smb-shares.conf

smbcontrol smbd reload-config

 

# Lastly, when finished copying the files to the external disk you'll need to un-mount it before un-plugging it.

umount /mnt/ntfs_disk

(Yes, it is umount, not unmount. The first "n" is missing in the command name)

 

All these steps are automated in unMENU's disk manager...  The ntfs-3g driver can be installed using its package-manager. But, as I said, you can do it all yourself on the command line.

 

You can find unMENU through this post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5568.0

(It is on google.code)

 

Joe L.

Ok, thanks a lot, Joe. I think I'm almost there, but I still have one more issue.

 

So I installed unMENU and used the web interface to download/install the ntfs-3g driver. I was then able to mount the ntfs drive not in the protected array, and then remount it as read/write instead of just read. I can then use unMENU's file browser to see the drive and the files on it. My issue is getting the drive to be shared on the network in such a way that I can push files onto it from the unRAID server via my desktop.

 

So I then decided to undo all the mounting that unMENU had done and instead use SNAP. It seems that I can now use SNAP to write to the ntfs drive because of the new ntfs-3g driver, but it doesn't seem perfect, yet. When I used Windows Explorer to view my shares, I could see my unRAID shares and the ntfs drive. I copied some files onto the ntfs drive from unRAID, but the transfer was going fairly slowly (about 5MB/s). I have a 100Mbps network, and so I suspect that the data is going from unRAID, to my desktop, and then back to unRAID. Ideally I can get the data do go from one drive, straight to the other without leaving the unRAID box. If I can achieve that, then those two drives (both SATA), should be able to transfer between each other at around 40MB/s, if not a little more.

 

Do you have any insight as to what the problem might be? Is it simply the nature of using Windows Explorer to transfer files?

 

Thanks again, again. I hope this thread will be useful to other people as well.