I’m ready to get a new 2TB MyCloud to replace a 2TB MBL (its going to my son). In the current configuration, I have lots of files under 5 different users on the MBL. I also have a Time Machine backup share where my current macbook pro places its files/sparsebundle. Additionally, I have a safepoint which does a weekly backup to a router-attached USB drive.
My plans are to 1) create the 5 user accounts on the MyCloud first, then 2) copy over their files. My concern is if I use SSH and copy between MBL → MyCloud the file permissions will not match (including if I just plug in the USB safepoint can copy via SSH). It would be prohibited for me to login as each user (on my Mac) and copy all of their files.
Any suggestions on the best/fastest way to get this done?
The fastest way is to do a copy paste from mapped network drive in e.g windows
trust me im **bleep** about speed… i had to move from MBL to WDC and copy in windows was the fastest assuming you have a gigabit hard wir connection, no wireless
I anticipated on a few hours of work to move all the files, in the end it took me a couple of days. Was no fun. I did make some mistakes, for instance I tried FTP to see if it was faster. Only to find out later that the files got a new time stamp. In the end copying through Windows Explorer was for me the safest way. I did not bother on the user file permissions because the MyCloud just makes a mess of that I believe.
One of the things that I did not expect to happen: I had the shares all mapped to drive letters. But most of my applications (ACDSee and Acronis for instance) store the UNC name instead of drive letter. I hoped that my applications would not note the swapped NAS, but they all did. For instance for ACDSee I had to rebuild the database all over again.
hahaa,the MAC crowd should have answered :smiley: . If you were on Windows I would have told you that the fastest way (no desktop shares as I dont use them) to mirror a disk<->nas is to use the builtin Windows command “ROBOCOPY”. With MAC I am totally ignorant.
Thanks for the replies so far… I have both Windows 7 and Mac so either would be fine. I’m not too obsessed with time stamps of the files but I am concerned about user permissions. If I do coping as Admin, users will not be able to control their files because of the wrong permissions. I’m sure I could SSH and make the changes but it sure would take a long time to do recurrsive chown/chgrp/file settings by hand.
Thanks for the replies so far… I have both Windows 7 and Mac so either would be fine. I’m not too obsessed with time stamps of the files but I am concerned about user permissions. If I do coping as Admin, users will not be able to control their files because of the wrong permissions. I’m sure I could SSH and make the changes but it sure would take a long time to do recurrsive chown/chgrp/file settings by hand.
HI
OK, I use it like this to mirror folders while preserving all timestamps, permissions, ACL’s and other attributes.
the basic syntax is this (from a dos command line)
The MIR option will mirror folder1 to folder 2, therefore, anything file that is in folder1 but not in folder2 will be added. Any file in folder2 that is not in folder1, will be deleted. All permissions are preserved.
/R and /W, the number of tries shoudl it fail.
/COPY : DAT will copy everything while preserving all data, timestamps and attributes
Thanks for the replies so far… I have both Windows 7 and Mac so either would be fine. I’m not too obsessed with time stamps of the files but I am concerned about user permissions. If I do coping as Admin, users will not be able to control their files because of the wrong permissions. I’m sure I could SSH and make the changes but it sure would take a long time to do recurrsive chown/chgrp/file settings by hand.
HI
OK, I use it like this to mirror folders while preserving all timestamps, permissions, ACL’s and other attributes.
the basic syntax is this (from a dos command line)
The MIR option will mirror folder1 to folder 2, therefore, anything file that is in folder1 but not in folder2 will be added. Any file in folder2 that is not in folder1, will be deleted. All permissions are preserved.
/R and /W, the number of tries shoudl it fail.
/COPY : DAT will copy everything while preserving all data, timestamps and attributes
whsbuss - if you are comfy with SSH and cp command, please note that -p switch for cp preserves both time stamps and permissions of files and directories…so your command for recursive copy would be like:
cp -rp <source_dir> <target_dir>
(-r for recursive, -p for preserve, -rp combining them)
This will be the quickest way to copy since you are issuing the command natively. Also, if it’s terabytes of data and it will take hours to finish, you can issue this command to run using nohup command and to run in background (using &)…and once you’ve hit Enter, you can exit the SSH session, the file copying will continue in the background.
e.g. nohup cp -rp <source_dir> <target_dir> &
Cybernut1 wrote:
whsbuss - if you are comfy with SSH and cp command, please note that -p switch for cp preserves both time stamps and permissions of files and directories…so your command for recursive copy would be like:
cp -rp <source_dir> <target_dir>
(-r for recursive, -p for preserve, -rp combining them)
This will be the quickest way to copy since you are issuing the command natively. Also, if it’s terabytes of data and it will take hours to finish, you can issue this command to run using nohup command and to run in background (using &)…and once you’ve hit Enter, you can exit the SSH session, the file copying will continue in the background.
e.g. nohup cp -rp <source_dir> <target_dir> &
Very familiar with SSH and Unix/Linux. I have about 450GB of copying so I expect a few hours of work ahead. Yes the CP command works very well with recursive. What I may do is a safepoint update on the network USB, then plug that into the MyCloud and do the CP to the new shares.
The USB connection at the back of the unit may be slower than an Ethernet wired connection, depending on your setup. If the computer that is connected to the MBL has a gigabit Ethernet, your router has a gigabit switch and your use cables Cat5e or above, I’d bet it would be faster to copy from your computer to the NAS rather than through the USB.
The USB connection at the back of the unit may be slower than an Ethernet wired connection, depending on your setup. If the computer that is connected to the MBL has a gigabit Ethernet, your router has a gigabit switch and your use cables Cat5e or above, I’d bet it would be faster to copy from your computer to the NAS rather than through the USB.
Yeah good point. I’m gigabit wired throughout my network.
But then you wouldn’t be able to do an unix copy, preserving permissions.
BTW, this is obvious but needs to be mentioned…you’ll need the same usernames to be setup on the new NAS before copying if you are trying to preserve file permissions, ownership, etc. I’m not sure what’d happen if the cp -p is done and the usernames from the old NAS don’t exist yet on the new NAS.
Having said all that, it might be better to copy not via USB but over ethernet as Etupes mentioned. I say that because unless your previous NAS is identical, different vendors’ NAS will obviously have different group names, and have different rules for how those groups behave…so unless you have same NAS model to NAS model transfer, trying to save permissions, owner ships, etc. will be meaningless. I don’t know about My Cloud regular but in My Cloud EX2 there are special groups called allshare, nobody and allaccount with special purposes that obviously won’t exist on most other NAS’ (except maybe My Cloud EX4) with which EX2 shares a codebase.
DOS = Disk Operating System (that thing that you get in Windows when you open a command line window…for older folks like me and jambalaya we still call it by the old name DOS from pre-Windows era when MS-DOS was the most common OS on PCs)
