GoKawiilI’ve had a Synology NAS for a very long time, and recently I started moving its contents to a new Ubiquiti UniFi UNAS Pro 8. This seemed like it ought to be a fairly boring operation. Both devices speak SMB, I have a fast network (recently upgraded to 10 gigabit internally), and Windows has had tools for copying files reliably between machines for decades. Naturally, it turned into a whole evening of learning things I thought I already knew, which is why I started a blog lol.
There was a nice bit of history here for me because back in 2007 (good lord!) I wrote a post called “XCopy considered harmful - Robocopy or XXCopy or SyncBack.” My argument at the time was basically that once you are moving enough files, Explorer stops being the move and Robocopy starts looking pretty good. I even used /Z , Robocopy’s restartable mode, because being able to resume a partially transferred file was useful on unreliable connections.
Almost twenty years later, /Z turned out to be one of the most important things I needed to remove because it made everything hella slow.
The migration
The basic job was straightforward. I had shares on the Synology such as:
\\server\music
and matching shares on the UNAS:
\\UNAS-Pro-8\music
I initially used Explorer, mostly because it was there and because sometimes the easy thing really is the easy thing. That lasted until Explorer started producing errors on individual files:
The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation
... continue reading