New user question on preserving timestamps in files


dknourek

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Hi all, My name is Dave and I want to start with I'm pretty new to Unraid and the forums as well even though I'm pretty old myself lol.  My apologies if this is covered somewhere but I have been at this for about a month now off and on with no thanks to a major injury that has me down, but I cant find any simple explanations and hopefully someone can chime in to help me out. 

 

(Long story short I am an Unraid and Linux noob and I need a utility I can use with Unraid and unassigned devices to transfer over 40TB of data using 8TB external drives and the thing that I'm struggling with is ***I need to preserve the file & folder time/date stamps for my work*** of the files being transferred. -- Longer version below lol)

 

I built up my first Unraid server in this past December and I'm loving it, so much so that I've built a second and I want them to eventually mirror each other as the new one is offsite and is going to be a backup.

 

My main dilemma is that I need to maintain the timestamps on the files that are transferred and have had zero success on finding any utility or otherwise that can/will do that. I heard about rsync but I know absolutely nothing of Linux command lines and the guide I found on it was highly confusing on what command switches to use so that one is out for the moment. I also tried Krusader which transferred the files to the external pretty fast over USB 3, and I could have sworn that I read in its documentation that it would preserve the time/date stamps on the files and folders being transferred but have had zero success on that one as well. On my main server I have installed unassigned devices and have an external drive that I'm going to use to transfer the initial large amounts of data to and then plug it in to the other server. I'm using the external 8TB drive to transferring the files as I have over 40TB of data and transferring across the internet is not and option lol, and I have a next to zero budget so buying 10gb network cards and a 10GB switch is not an option either even though I would love to do that as over a 1GB hardline it would take about 4 to 6 weeks to transfer the data. 

 

Hopefully someone knows of a GUI utility or the like that I can use, or a very beginner guide to using something like rsync… 

 

Cheers and thank you very much in advance,

-dave

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Well as I continued to search I may have stumbled across a solution thanks to a post I found on Unraid's terminal commands and their similar DOS commends, along with SpaceInvaderOne's youtube channel where he made a video on upgrading a Plex server with using rsync which also helped a ton. Hopefully I managed to wrap my head around it with using " rsync -avh -progress /mnt/user/source/ /mnt/disks/target/ " minus the quotes of course, and source / target being the folder/share paths... Fingers crossed for the next little bit to see how the transfer is going as far as preserving the date/time stamps. 

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