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Forum Discussion
Best practice for rearranging large directories
Situation: I have two large Shares (one is about 4TB, the other about 2TB) on this ReadyNAS with four 8TB drives in a RAID5 X-RAID configuration. Of the available 23TB, about 15TB are free. The large...
Blues11 wrote:
To make access easier, I'd like to amalgamate those 4 top level directories into one large directory with about 2200 directories.
You might find that easier, but browsing will likely be quite a bit slower.
StephenB and Sandshark, thank you for your responses.
First, I'd forgotten about the Move command in Unix and that it simply updates the index, not the files themselves.
Upon reflection, I looked at the amount of space available on the ReadyNAS and realized that I could just do a copy because the amount of data is not that large. Then I thought about the access speed and whether four directores with a few thousand subdirectories will really be noticeably speedier than having all of them just below one high level directory.
So, I decided that I'd test my supposition in a new share. So far, I've copied 900+ directories onto the new share and I have not noticed any slower access speeds. I think I'll go ahead and continue to copy all the files onto the new share and see if the speeds become slower. If everything works OK, then I'll delete the old share with the four top level directories and their data and free up the terabytes of space.
If you're interested, when I'm done I'll post again and let you know.
Thank you both so much for your knowledge and desire to share it.
Blues11 wrote:StephenB and Sandshark, thank you for your responses.
First, I'd forgotten about the Move command in Unix and that it simply updates the index, not the files themselves.
It doesn't really apply to you any longer, but for completion's sake for anyone else looking for solutions, a mv between shares does do a copy and delete on a ReadyNAS because shares are BTRFS sub-volumes. mv between directories in the same share does not. Those can be important when using snapshots. A mv between directories won't totally re-snapshot the content, but one between shares will. So the mv between shares will still have the file in the snapshot of the first share as well as being on the new one, taking addiitonal space until purged.
Sandshark wrote:
a mv between shares does do a copy and delete on a ReadyNAS because shares are BTRFS sub-volumes.Yes. But you can do a cp --reflink between shares - which is the same speed as a mv, and doesn't add any space. Then do a delete of the original.
This continuing tale: But sort of a new topic:
So I deleted the Share with the four first level directories (with a combing total about 2200+ subdirectories). The ReadyNAS OS told me that it would take some time. That was 22 hours ago. The share is gone, but virtually none of its space (about 3.5TB) has been freed.
I just ran a Defrag but that didn't seem to change the available space. Is there something else I need to do?
Thank you again for all of your help.
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