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Copying data from 6 hard drives to 1 big one, in linux (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by applemao@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
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Maybe a dumb question. But is this just a matter of copying over? I have 6 hdds I've accumulated and want all the data from them on one big drive now. They are all ntfs as they are from windows, but I am going to boot from my mint drive to move the files, just so windows isnt running or accessing anything on the drives while I move the data. I'm transitioning to full linux, but I want to consolidate these drives first. I dont want to clone drives, so no dd here, just copying files from 6 different drives onto 1.

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[-] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

Extra piece of advice that you might already be aware of: Be sure to shut down Windows fully before attempting the copying of drives.

Windows fast boot can leave an active session on a disk and Linux NTFS capabilities will often detect that Windows session and thus refuse to perform certain operations. This is more for writing to affected disks than reading from them, but there's no harm in doing the full shut down on the Windows side first to avoid any potential issues.

Oh, and if you have other backup methods other than the one you're about to attempt, use those first. For example, if you have any really important documents, now would be a good time to get them onto a USB drive, the cloud or other external storage that can't be damaged if something does go wrong.

There's no immediately obvious reason that anything will go wrong, but better safe than sorry.

[-] applemao@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Appreciate it! Does that have an affect for drives that don't have windows on them? I should have clarified. I have 1 ssd with windows, the other 6 hdds have no OS

[-] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

You mentioned that they're NTFS, which I took to mean they'd been in a Windows machine at some point even if they weren't the system drive. If they were taken from a system that hadn't been shut down properly, I imagine, though don't know for certain, that there's a chance that might cause an issue for some files that are flagged as in-use by Windows.

I'm basing this on an experience I had trying to move an NTFS partition on a drive, which isn't the same as just copying, I grant you, and Linux resolutely refused to do that because it detected that Windows wasn't done with the drive. It didn't say that specifically though, only that there was a problem. It took me a few minutes to figure that one out.

So, if you were to have trouble copying files, it would be worth a try to mount that drive under Windows, do a quick scandisk from there and then unmount it, which ought to clear any active session flags that might be on it.

Again, this is all in theory, because I've not been in your specific situation.

(I did once successfully manage to scandisk and defrag an external NTFS HDD by doing hardware pass-through to a Windows VM running under Linux, but again, that's not quite the same thing, and that was for maintenance purposes, not as a prelude to backup.)

[-] applemao@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Ohh I see. Thank you very much!

[-] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

Yup. Just straight up copy the files over.

Moving files from ntfs to ext4/btrfs should work just fine.

Something you may want to double-check, is the ownership and permissions on the files, once you're done.

[-] highball@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Shouldn't be any problems. I'd suggest rclone. Great tool. I use it to reliably and safely copy files from my cloud server block storage to two different blob storage locations. rlcone will do anything. A simple cp will probably get it all done for you too, but I don't know how important the data is to you.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Have you looked into building a simple NAS? Storing files on single disks is generally bad since it is inefficient and can lead to data loss and theft.

It might sound like overkill but it gives you a lot of power and flexibility. Get an old desktop with at least 8gb of ram and then install a few drives. Next install TrueNAS, configure the disks, configure file share and call it a day.

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com -1 points 1 month ago

@possiblylinux127 @applemao I wouldn't worry so much about efficiency as redundancy, better to have at least two drives and set up a RAID1 array, and given that the Linux kernel already has RAID, NFS, etc, I don't see the point in being dependent upon additional software such as TruNAS. That said yes it's just a matter of copying files to move the data over BUT a windows executable often will not work in a LInux environment even with wine, particularly if it contains what is known as a rootkit anti-cheat. You can however fairly easily setup a windows vm under linux.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Raid1 isn't the most performant by itself. (Thats what I mean by efficiency) It is better to use 4 disks with data being written to two disks at a time.

The benefit of a dedicated NAS is that it works with basically any client OS. Both Windows and Linux have good support for SMB so it is just a matter of mounting the drive. Wine doesn't matter in this case.

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

@possiblylinux127 To be sure, but I assume since he was formerly running Windows performance wasn't an issue. No, it's obvious he is more concerned with getting the clutter factor down so he stated a preference for a single large drive, and if data isn't important or backed up some other media fine. If not, then you risk losing your data because sooner later drives fail. If performance was really the goal he'd raid a bunch of nvme drives together. This, by the way, is what I do for the system that runs this friendica node, along with an 18 core processor and 256 gb of RAM.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 0 points 1 month ago

You might want to use rsync rather than a GUI file browser. I don't know if it'll be faster, but it'll be more reliable, especially if you want to stop and restart it, or just plain restart it if it fails for some reason.

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com -1 points 1 month ago

@applemao Yep, I would just mount the windows partitions on /mnt one at a time and copy the data where you want to go, cp -a /mnt/data/ /newlocation/data/

this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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