[BNM] Transferring 60GB of files from one server to another

[Barney Livingston]

On Tuesday 02 December 2008 14:38:49 James Moss wrote:
> Im working on a side project and we've just had a fast shiny new linux
> server installed for us to replace the old one.  However we've got 60GB of
> files in the wwwroot folder which need to be transferred to the new server
> over the gigabit network.  Whats the fastest way of doing it? Is SSHing in
> and doing an FTP transfer fast enough or is there a better way?
>
> Weve also got a fairly large DB (its just under 5GB, 3.5GB of which is a
> single table).  Whats the best way of getting that across too?  I was
> planning on dumping the current one to an .sql file and executing it on the
> new server but i presume the inserts will take aaaaages.

Netcat and tar is probably quickest:

On the receiving end do:

netcat -l -p 7000 | tar x

And on the sending end do:

tar cf - * | netcat otherhost 7000

from http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/~djw/tarpipe.html

No security of course.

I think dump and reimport is the best way to do the db and yes it will 
probably take ages. If it's Mysql and they're identical versions at both ends 
you might be able to get away with copying the data directories. You might 
even get to keep all the broken halves.

Barney