Why?

There are a plenty amount of good programs out there that do this task great. So why another one? Because there is a single case where where I could not find any solution good enough and this is why I made this application. The case is when you want to move a bunch of small files distributed in many directories from one disk to another.

In my case I have several nodes collecting data with small disks (5TB) which are generating like 800 MB daily distributed in 800 files in 50 directories. Once the small disk is more or less full, I dump all the contents to a bigger storage (where it will be processed). This task implies moving millions of files. Using rsync or other traditional tools takes a long time. Basically because they copy the files one by one and trying to make rsync concurrent requires a lot of "tricks" using tools like parallel or xargs, apart from preparing a correct strategy that allows an effective use of these tools. It was very "complicated" and I wanted something easy to use but powerful.

This application just does this concurrent stuff.

Copier

This program copies the files in an asynchronous way. Every directory is procesed in a different tokio task. It uses a task pool to control the maximum concurrency. Basically the program discovers new directories and spawns more tasks as soon as it find new directories. You have to choose this value wisely because more concurrency does not mean more speed and actually a big value may make your disk transfers slower. Asynchronous soluions are a game changer in some situations but they are not a silver bullet.

I found out that using this solution I can reach the maximum throughput that the disks can give but you have to find the best value for your disks by trying different values while measuring it with tools like iotop.

If you have a few directories with huge files, this program will never out perform rsync and it could be even slower. Remember that asyc costs, and this overhead does not provide any benefit in this case.

When use this program

• Huge amount of files distributed in many directories
• Small files (up to a few megabytes)

Whe not to use this progarm

• Big files
• Single o a few directories

Using the program

Only two parameteres are required: source and destination. Apart from that, you can specify if you want to remove the source (move the files) and the concurrency level. For example:

--source data_origin --destination data_destination --delete-source true --concurrency 20

But you can always run with --help to get more details

Lacking functionalities

Metrics, progress bar and these kind of fancy things are not implemented.