DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Fast: Put one drive from each into the NAS or a PC and copy the files between disks.

Safe and moderately fast: Mount one NAS directly from the other and copy the files. Using a USB enclosure also falls in the category.

Safest and slow: Copy from your PC from one to the other.

Last edited by FunFiler (2011-02-27 10:55:33)

If you are only going to do this once and you don't want to mess with a fun_plug, I'd say do it the slow way - use a PC to copy the data from one NAS to the other.  You can let it run overnight and it won't take that much longer.  The NAS is likely going to be the bottleneck anyway since it does not have much memory or speed.  And so doing the internal disk copy may not buy you much, unless you have your NAS's  attached over a really slow network.

Yes, for the fast method, you'll have to install a fun_plug.  You can use the ffp fun_plug and not bother with the installation past the point of getting telnet working.  Then telnet into the NAS and copy the files with a command like:

cp -a /mnt/HD_b2/music /mnt/HD_a2/music

assuming that your source disk is the 'B' disk in the left drive bay.  You would run this command on the NAS at the telnet prompt, not from your PC.

Once finished, you can uninstall ffp.

The USB drive method isn't much different.  You'd still need a fun_plug and you'd have to get the USB drive working.  There are instructions for that on the wiki.

250 GB isn't that much anyway - it should take 4-8 hours.

Any file permission issues could easily be fixed in a telnet/ssh session after copying if required if FFP is installed.

Yeah, you could plug both drives into a "modern" PC and boot a live linux (or whatever) CD to do the copy.

If you pick the right copy method and select the right parms to preserve ownership and permissions for whatever copy command you use, you should not encounter problems that need repair later.  It is wiser to avoid the problem upfront.  Also, repairing permissions and ownership problems is NOT trivial in places such as the ffp tree, where they really are important.

You can use plain old cp with -a or whatever options you'd like.

The tar and cpio commands are also good at preserving file attributes:

cpio example:
cd fromdir
find . | cpio -pdumv todir

tar example:
cd fromdir; tar cf – . | (cd todir; tar xfp -)

where fromdir and todir are your mount points for the two drives.

karlrado wrote:

It is wiser to avoid the problem upfront.  Also, repairing permissions and ownership problems is NOT trivial in places such as the ffp tree, where they really are important.

If copied to a temporary or isolated directory, then it is as simple as:
chown -R nobody:501 /path to new directory/

unmesh wrote:

Just finished copying the contents of an almost full 1TB drive to the new 2TB drive using a PC booted to Ubuntu. Took about 5 hours which is a lot faster than drive to drive within the DNS.

FWIW, when I upgraded my DNS-323 drives from 1TB to 2TB a couple months back, I did the data move by SSHing into the DNS and using the cp command.  Took about 10 hours, most of which was overnight...

jhtopping wrote:

FunFiler wrote:

Fast: Put one drive from each into the NAS or a PC and copy the files between disks.

Would this approach work if the firmware was not the same on both machines?

My primary server has 1.09 installed and is starting to have thermostat problems and then hang during the reboot process.  The disks are both 2TB drives, WD20EADS.  The test server is running 1.10b7 and the drives are WD10EARS.  Space is not a problem in going to the smaller disks, but I am concerned about about the 1.10 machine reading disks formatted differently.

If you are just copying files and not reformatting the destination disk, you should be fine.  The machine doing the copy (NAS or PC) would need to have support for the filesystem types (e.g., ext2, ext3) of course.