What's the best way to validate if your backup has completed successfully?
I am moving from an NV+ to a new 516.
I setup backup jobs on my 516 to connect to my NV+ over NFS and copy the data to the 516. NFS threads is set to 2 on both the 516 and NV+
The backup ran and ran. It looks like it finished. When I do a get info on the folders they appear to be the same size. (but i'm questioning the accuracy of get info now). When I spot check a few files and folders they look OK. But I can't manually check 5TB worth of files.
Here's why I think get info may not be correct. One of the backup jobs was supposed to copy a .sparseBundle folder from the NV+ to it's new home on the 516. (this is in normal shares, not in a weird timemachine share) It runs for a couple of hours and says it's finished, i looked at the get info and only 9 of the 917 GB were there according to get info. So i tried the job with rsync. it ran for days, and never said it finished, but the get info sizes matched. I deleted the sparsebundle on the 516 and setup a new job using NFS on the 516 to start the copy again, and it ran for about 10 minutes and said it finished and the get info size matched as well.
Now i setup readynas fault on some of the folders. looking at the folders sizes in readynas vault between the 516 and nv+ is dramatic in size differences. NV+ Contains: 1016 Files, 105 Folders Size: 3.29 GB 516 Contains: 494 Files, 53 Folders Size: 1.20 GB
It thought maybe it's the appledouble files haven't been created for all the files on the new nas yet, but that wouldn't explain the 2 GB size different would it?
So my question is what's the best way to validate that the files actually moved over completely?
If those were my own files and are really important to me, I would right-click on each folder and check the Properties such as the size of it and the number files/folders on it then I would even thoroughly check every folder on the destination NAS and compare it from the source NAS. I would even try to open a file or play videos to check if it will run fine. - This way of checking would really take time but this is just my own way because I do it.
I'd try something like Teracopy (which can verify as well as copy). There are similar tools for Mac.
The main disadvantage is that you need to run them from a PC, so syncing folders between two NAS won't be very fast. But since you really can't be sure that everything was transferred correctly (and you know that some files were missed), you probably do need to essentially redo it.
I'd also be working on figuring out what went wrong. It could possibly be network issues, or perhaps issues with the file system (permissions, hidden files, or other stuff). I'd loop in Netgear support if the new NAS is under warranty.
Good idea to call support. I am not overly impressed with their support. The people I need to talk to apparently doesn't work on the weekends and even when they are there, they don't take calls. Only return them. LOL. It's worse than scheduling the cable guy.
So I did some more digging and it does indeed appear that the .appledouble files are likely the reason for the discrepancy in number of files. The NFS copy didn't copy any of the apple double files. i think that should be ok. i still find it hard to believe that 400 appledouble files is 2G!! that's just nuts
<sigh> hopefully eventually when I talk to the sr tech, they'll be able to help sort it out.
So I think we got this worked out. When moving a large number of files from an older slower NAS that is using a different filesystem like EXT vs BTRFS, don't use NFS. Their recommendation was to use windows/nas which is called CIFS in the nv+ or use rsync.
NFS will probably work if you have a small number of files to copy, but I apparently had to many. The nv+ just couldn't keep up with the 516 and was skipping files in it's directory listing to the 516.
