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.
btrfscan pool disks just fine. Create a RAID nice and quick.There’s also
btrfs sendandreceive. Which may be what you need for shipping the data? You can use SSH for a secure write…If this is a one-time copy, I’d strongly consider just syncing the data vs. shipping drives (which, as people have pointed out, may have serious reliabilty concerns).
Otherwise, if you must ship, I’d say the best move is two copies of each piece of data, so any single drive failing in shipping isn’t a big deal. But not a RAID. Just two literal copies on two separate drives. Simplest way to ensure some redundancy.