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Forum Discussion
Copy files/folders via dashboard OS6.10.3 / RN214
After transferring files from a NV+v2 to a RN214 in a bulk 'backup' transfer, I then wanted to move the files and folders to specic areas on the RN214. I did this via the dashboard>shares. Firstl...
I haven't timed copying files in the web ui, and usually just use drag/drop.
Do you have snapshots enabled on the source share? If you did, then a move would result in the original files ending up in a snapshot on the source, and with a copy placed in the destination. Free space would be reduced as a result.
In general, moves using drag-and-drop are instant when you are reorganizing a share, but moves turn into copy-delete when you are moving files between shares.
The absolute fastest way to move files quickly is to use cp --reflink from ssh, and then delete the originals. The --reflink bit tells btrfs not to copy the datablocks, but instead to clone the metadata.
No snapshots, just plain shares, of course from a share to a home share breaks the boundary you mention.
But, 2GB/min seems extremely slow, it's even slower than a LAN copy! I'll do some more testing, so far this is not impressing me over the freedom and flexibility of OS5!
aks-2 wrote:
But, 2GB/min seems extremely slow, it's even slower than a LAN copy! I'll do some more testing, so far this is not impressing me over the freedom and flexibility of OS5!
It does seem very slow. I just did a copy/paste of an 8.7 GB file on my own RN202 using the web browser interface, and the paste took just a few seconds.
After more testing via the web I/F, I am seeing extremely slow moves across share boundaries, in an ssh window running 'top' I see fsbroker.cgi consuming 50-60% cpu. I've no idea what this is doing, well I think we do know, read-write-delete, but why is not clear.
Moves within the same share are practically instant (1-2 seconds), as you mention.
From an ssh window, I moved ~30GB across a share boundary using the mv command, it was virtually instant. I checked that the data was really moved, and as far as I could tell it was. The directories/files looked correct, du reported the right result.
Have I created any problems with file system integrity by moving data this way in a terminal session, or will the file system just figure it out?
In OS4.x and 5.x, shares are simply directories at the Linux level. In OS6, they are BTRFS sub-volumes. While this does give you a lot more control over each share (snapshots, COW, strict sync, etc.), one piece of baggage that comes with it is that standard file moves are, as StephenB said, a copy-and-delete function, not just moving a pointer to the data from one directory to another. Netgear could implement the use of the --reflink option for share to share copies, but the logic to make sure it's only used for that would likely not be trivial.
So, one thing to think about is Do you really need different shares?, or are different directories sufficient? If you don't need different permissions, protocols, or other things I mentioned earlier, then you probably don't need them to be separate shares.
You can, of course, continue to use the mv --reflink command from SSH as long as you are copying to an existing share. All will be fine using it, but don't create a new folder under /data (or whatever you named your volume) and expect it to show up as a share, because it won't. And don't delete one, either. You can create or remove directories within a share without any issues.
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