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I have two computers in my home network linked with a router with each other, I use to transfer small files using sftp but the transfer rate is very slow.
Now I want to move around 100GB of data from my laptop to the other computer in network. What would be the ideal way of transferring the data in a reasonably fast speed compared to sftp?
for larger file transfers i use rsync as that is very handy if something happens on the network, or one of users says - hell, i am going to reboot.
If transfer security is required, use rsync with ssh. searching for rsync over ssh should yield usable how-tos with explanations.
Other easy way is to install sshd (opensshd-server) and use sftp for transfers (along with scp)
I've found that rsync is pretty fast. You can set up NFS or SAMBA on both machines and rsync everything over.
If NFS and SAMBA aren't your thing skip the encryption and install vsftpd on the target machine and FTP away. vsftpd is very fast.
Is this a one time action or something you'll be doing ongoing?
Transferring lots of small files tends to be inefficient, so it would help if you could tar them up prior to transfer. Also, if your network link is secure (e.g. it's wired with only trusted systems on it), you can gain speed by just doing bare FTP.
If you have lots of data that you need to keep regularly in sync that only partially updates, rsync is optimized for this case.
Take out the disk and walk it over. Even if you need to "transfer", still take out the disk and walk it over for SATA/eSATA transfer. Use faster disks for better results.
