[vox-tech] Copying/ Moving Large number of files

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:48:34PM -0500, ALLO (Alfredo Lopez De Leon)
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I need to move a large number of directories whose size ranges from 1GB
> to 6 GB (multiple files ~400mb each) between two NFS partitions.  Which
> is the safest way to do it?  Will "mv dir1 /bla/bla/bla/dir1" will
> suffice?  The data is extremely valuable and I will hate to lose it
> during the process, should I do "copy" {cp -r dir1 /bla/bla/bla/dir1}
> instead and then remove the originals?


mv would be fine because the file isn't unlinked from the source until it
has successfully been written to the destination.

Still, I'd use rsync.  It has the advantage that it can resume if for some
reason the transfer gets interrupted. 

rsync -av dir1 /bla/bla/bla

Note the lack of trailing slash on 'dir1'.  If you include a trailing
slash, rsync will copy the *contents* of that directory and not the
directory itself.

If you're extra paranoid you can use md5sum to compare the files in the
source and destination.

p.s. if the data is that valuable, then maybe you should keep it in both
places :)

-t