I was following the Safer Method outlined in the wiki and had transferred about 800GB of Disk 4 over to Disk 21 when a different drive in the array (Disk 7) failed and was being emulated. I decided to play it safe and force shutdown the server mid transfer because I didn't want to risk a second drive failing and losing data ( I only have 1 parity drive at the moment)

 

I've already replaced the failed drive and rebuilt parity. My question is: Can I run the same command again without issue?

 

rsync -avX /mnt/disk4/ /mnt/disk21

 

What will happen if I type that again? Is it smart enough to see that I already transferred about 800GB of files and resume where it left off? Will it start from the beginning and simply overwrite all of the data again? Or will it make duplicates on the drive?

 

**The reason I was scared of another drive failing and forced the shutdown is because I have about 3 old disks with SMART errors (which is why I'm consolidating old drives into a new larger one)

29 minutes ago, fonzie said:

What will happen if I type that again? Is it smart enough to see that I already transferred about 800GB of files and resume where it left off?

This.

Thank you.  I'll run the command right now.  I appreciate the clarification.

Follow up curveball question:

 

Can I copy all of the contents of disk21 (including the incomplete files from the cancelled disk4 process) to another disk (lets say disk 8) and then run the command:

 

rsync -avX /mnt/disk4/ /mnt/disk8

 

and have it resume the sync to disk8 even though the original process was started moving the files to disk 21?

 

I'm thinking (hoping) yes because it will just compare files from both drives and sync them, as the name implies...but I want to be sure.

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by fonzie

Yes.