Local file copy using SMB shares

Question

I created two SMB shares for my local disks on my server: disk1 and disk2. Using my laptop I can access the shares. If I try to copy files between these two shares using my laptop the speed is very bad due to my wifi speed.

Is there a way to do the "copy job" as a local job on the server instead of sending the data through my slow wifi connection? I would like to organize my data on my server but that's impossible with this slow connection.

Answer 1

Background

The I/O (copy) operation between two different shares does not take place efficiently on the remote side. Instead, all data is being transferred via the client. This is by design of the CIFS/SMB protocol. I can think of two workarounds.

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Use SFTP

SFTP is built-in to SSH in Ubuntu, so you already have it once you have OpenSSH server installed. In Nautilus, you can do this either using the menu or by entering a manual location.

And browse in your file manager as you would using the command-line way as user.

Command-line way: press Ctrl+L to get a textual location bar. Then use this as the location:

sftp://user@hostname

On KDE (Dolphin), it's

fish://user@hostname

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Make them one share

If you prefer to stick with CIFS/SMB access, then the only option I see is to make them one share. You can even make it an additional share or have them there just temporarily.

First, make sure they're mounted on a similar level of folders, e.g.

/mnt
└── shares
    ├── disk1
    └── disk2

And then just share /mnt/shares.