04 November 2012

Speeding Up Copy Process Between Two Hard Drives

cp command is not suitable for large data transfers between two hard drives. It makes about 10..100KB/sec. Obviously, it will take 29 hours to copy 10GB with 100KB/sec.

There are many ways to speed up copying process -- using USB, Firewire, Ethernet etc. But if everything is done on a local machine, rsync is very effective and simple to use. For example, the following shows how to copy files over the virtual loopback device:

$ mkdir -p /mnt/hdd
$ sudo mount /dev/sdbX /mnt/hdd
$ rsync -az user@localhost:/some/folder/* /mnt/dest-hdd/

a("archive mode") option takes care of permissions, ownership, group, symlinks and so. z instructs rsync to use compression.

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