Help! Trying to safely migrate files from Windows to Linux.
 

It's Christmas Eve LQers!

I don't figure that Santa will be leaving me with a solution come Christmas morn, so I thought I might try and hit up the community for a little bit of assitance.

I've recently decided to run my own server, and I have chosen to go with Ubuntu Server LTS 10.04. So far, I like it, but I'm also kind of learning on the go.

I have printing and sharing set up and working, and now it's time to migrate ALL my files from my Windows desktop to my Ubuntu Server. I'm going to have to transfer about 4 TB of data, and so I was wondering what would be the best method to do this so that I can ensure that my data is kept intact during the transfer.

As always, thanks for the support, and Happy Holidays!

rsync. And once it's done, run it again.

what format are the windows files?
FAT? NTFS?
Some Linux distro can read ntfs (nearly all can read FAT).
Personally, I moved few GBs from FAT to ext2 (copy from a FAT HDD to another ext2 HDD). No issue seen till this day.

Thanks for the replies.

To answer your question stuttgart, I have migrated the files from NTFS drives to EXT4 formatted drives with no issues thus far. That said, it's only a small amount of the data that I was testing to ensure compatability.

I also forgot to mention in my original post that these are simply drives with raw data. They don't have any active system files that will need to be addressed.

Why run rsync twice? Also, how would I go about running rsync if the files are on a Windows system?