I am trying to copy the entire contents of one partition on one machine to a partition on another machine. It is a bunch of video footage in avi format and can be sized anywhere from 12 - 24 Tb worth of data. The partitions may not be the same size on both machines, but will be enough to hold the data on either machine. I am trying to avoid installing any additional software on these machines as well. As far as physical connection, I was going to connect both machines gigabit ethernet cards together with a cat6 crossover cable and set the ip addresses to talk to each other. Unless there is a better method for this. I am open to the connection types, methods, and transfer methods. I would like a reccommendation on the best way to get this transfer completed. Secure connections arent necessary as this is on a network with only these machines at the moment. I am a little new to linux, so a detailed command example would be most appreciated.

I was thinking of setting up a ssh connection folder (from network servers menu) and then just click and drag, but I have a feeling this will be slow.

Also looked at rsync and scp commands, but I think I could gain some efficiencies by not utilizing ssh.

Please help.

I would have one side share it's volume with NFS to the other side. NFS will be fast. And I would use rsync to copy from the mounted volume to the local volume (or vise versa). rsync is great for local / mounted directory copying without the overhead of piping through SSH.

- Arch

Any good resources on the setup of NFS, or could you give me a quick walkthrough? As I said I am a little green on linux. Thank you for your help.

NFS is pretty simple. Edit /etc/exports (man exports for info) and list the directories to share with the hosts to share them to. On the client side, "mount nfsserver:/path /localpath" and that's about it. The docs for /etc/exports I think are complete enough to get you going.

Here's a share from a system I manage:

/data/backups \ 10.1.0.0/24(rw,root_squash,no_all_squash,sync,anonuid=65534,anongid=65534)

But you don't need basically any of the options I've given, probably:

/path/to/files ho.st.i.p

Is all you need in your case

Ciao,
- Archangel