I want to transfer 80 TB of data to another locatio . I already have the drives for it. The idea is to copy everything to it, fly it to the target and use or copy the data on/to the server.
What filesystem would you use and would you use a raid configuration? Currently I lean towards 8 single disk filesystems on the 10 TB drives with ext4, because it is simple. I considered ZFS because of the possiblity to scrub at the target destination and/or pool all drives. But ZFS may not be available at the target.
There is btrfs which should be available everywhere because it is in mainline linux and ZFS is not. But from my knowledge btrfs would require lvm to pool disks together like zfs can do natively.
Pooling the drives would also be a problem if one disk gets lost during transit. If I have everything on 8 single disks at least the remaining data can be used at the target and they only have to wait for the missing data.
I like to read about your opinions or practical experience with similar challanges.
If you’re flying with drives full of data, better encrypt the data first. I’d just use the drives as a backup target for borg backup. Then at the other end, restore everything. You might need a spare, empty drive to get that process going. Alternatively, use your favorite encrypted file system if you want to keep the data encrypted after arrival, maybe a good idea too.
Better plan some logistics for one or more drives failing during this process too. I assume you have an intact copy of the data at home. So you can get a new drive written and shipped to you if something goes wrong.
Why do you have to do all this in person anyway though? Can’t you ship drives and have someone at the other end install them in a box for you? For that matter, is 80TB really too much data to transfer by network? With a mere 1 gbit connection it’s about a week of transfer.