I’m writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.

This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I’ve taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.

  • Joelk111
    5•4 months ago

    When I was moving from a Windows NAS (God, fuck windows and its permissions management) on an old laptop to a Linux NAS I had to copy about 10TB from some drives to some other drives so I could re-format the drives as a Linux friendly format, then copy the data back to the original drives.

    I was also doing all of this via terminal, so I had to learn how to copy in the background, then write a script to check and display the progress every few seconds. I’m shocked I didn’t loose any data to be completely honest. Doing shit like that makes me marvel at modern GUIs.

    Took about 3 days in copying files alone. When combined with all the other NAS setup stuff, ended up taking me about a week just in waiting for stuff to happen.

    I cannot reiterate enough how fucking difficult it was to set up the Windows NAS vs the Ubuntu Server NAS. I had constant issues with permissions on the Windows NAS. I’ve had about 1 issue in 4 months on the Linux NAS, and it was much more easily solved.

    The reason the laptop wasn’t a Linux NAS is due to my existing Plex server instance. It’s always been on Windows and I haven’t yet had a chance to try to migrate it to Linux. Some day I’ll get around to it, but if it ain’t broke… Now the laptop is just a dedicated Plex server and serves files from the NAS instead of local. It has much better hardware than my NAS, otherwise the NAS would be the Plex server.

    • calm.like.a.bombEnglish
      3•4 months ago

      so I had to learn how to copy in the background, then write a script to check and display the progress every few seconds

      I hope you learned about terminal multiplexers in the meantime… They make your life much easier in cases like this.