Re: [PLUG] Copying files to multiple volumes

You can use a boustrophedon-inspired heuristic that will likely give a good-enough fit. For two drives, create the same directory hierarchy on both drives, and sort the file sizes from largest to smallest. Then put the largest file on disk1 in the directory where it belongs, the next two on disk 2 in the directories where they belong, the next two on disk 1, the next two on disk two, and so on. You can extend this heuristic to n drives.

Regards

– Bhaskar

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 6:32 PM Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 05:25:29PM -0400, Keith via plug wrote:
> On 10/28/20 5:17 PM, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> > These drives might well be used by someone using Windows instead of
> > Linux, so changing the filesystem isn't an option.
> >
> > Also, please reply to the mailing list instead of me personally.
> >
> > Walt
>
> Until you said it might be used by someone in the Windows world, I would
> have send just LVM a bunch of external drives. I don't know of anything
> that would acceptable in both worlds at that layer.
>
> I take it storing and then re-connecting them to a Linux based NAS running
> Samba is not a viable option if the data needs to be accessed, yes?

No, that's way too complicated. The drives need to keep their current
fs (I think it's probably NTFS) and the files need to look like
regular files in their original hierarchy.

I was hoping there might be some tool leftover from the days of tapes
and floppies, sort of like tar but without the special tar format. I
was really hoping there might be an option to rsync that would work,
but if so I can't find it.

Oh well. Turns out the data won't even fit on 2 drives.

Walt
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