I need to copy a very large directory (talking in terabytes here) and want to monitor the progress.
I found that pv is a nice utility, but how can I use it for copying directories recursively? (pv src > dst doesn't work because they are directories)
PS: Running on OS X Mountain Lion, pv was installed from Mac Ports
Use rsync --progress [SRC] [DST]
Do check the man rsync page because it has a lot of very useful options. -a for archive is a good start, but it depends on your exact requirements.
Copying through a pipe will unnecessarily slow down the copy process, especially if it is files based.
--progress will only show you the per-file progress of each single file, not the overall process of a potentially larger file copy process of several files / folders.
Commented
Jun 16, 2020 at 18:09
You could use tar or pax or cpio:
mkdir -p dst &&
(cd src && tar cf - .) | pv -trb | (cd dst && tar xpf -)
v to the tar command to see the file names.
tar cf - outputs a stream containing the files and their metadata, which is fed through a pipe to pv which feeds it untouched to the other tar while printing a progress indication, and the other tar extracts the data in that stream. All three commands run concurrently and process data as it comes, there is nothing stored on disk, there is nothing stored in memory other than the pipe buffers and the commands internal buffers which just amounts to a few kilobytes.
Commented
Mar 8, 2018 at 13:31
pv has no way to know how much data there is to transfer. If you have an estimate of that amount, you can pass it to it with the -s option (GNU du -sb src would give you a good approximation if the files are large enough)
Commented
Mar 8, 2018 at 15:06
Here are some commands to copy directories with progress information.
If there are many small files:
cp -av sourcedir targetdir | pv -l -s filecount > logfile
This will report progress based on number of files that are copied.
You can redirect to /dev/null if you don't need logfile.
Use the following command to get filecount:
find sourcedir | wc -l
If there are few huge files:
tar c sourcedir | pv -s size | tar x -C targetdir
This will report progress based on bytes that are copied.
targetdir must exist.
Use the following command to get size:
du -sh sourcedir
If you want to use rsync:
rsync -ai sourcedir/ targetdir/ | pv -l -s filecount > logfile
Get filecount as shown above.
If you are copying on the same system then rsync -a is practically the same as cp -a . The advantages of rsync is when you are copying over the network or if you are updating (or comparing) a previous copy.
See here for more details:
Estimate time or work left to finish for rsync?
Compare directories but not content of files
for completeness some more alternatives
https://github.com/Xfennec/progress this tool can report progress even if the process already started.
https://github.com/aioobe/eta this can report progress based on any value obtained from a command. for example df -h
Tar.
tar -cf - /var/log/ | pv | tar -C . -x
Example:
# tar -cf - /var/log/ | pv | tar -C . -x
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
58MB 0:00:05 [ 2.2MB/s] [ <=>
I made a progress bar for rsync (in a wrapper):
rsyncy -a FROM/ TO
It looks like this:
More info on GitHub, install with pip3 install --user rsyncy
You could do a du -b /directory/ on both source and destination while a normal copy command is in progress, and compare the two. This is just as effective and doesn't slow the copy process by pushing it through a pipe.
find source-dir -print0 | xargs -0 -I % pv % > dest-dir/%
