What is the fastest way to move a million images from one directory to another in Linux?

Question

I have a million images that takes up 30GB of disk space that need to be moved from one local directory to another local directory.

What would be the most efficient way to do this? Using mv? Using cp? Using rsync? Something else?

I need to take these:

/path/to/old-img-dir/*
                     00000000.jpg
                     --------.jpg  ## nearly 1M of them! ##
                     ZZZZZZZZ.jpg

and move them here:

/path/to/new/img/dir/

Answer 1

rsync would be a poor choice because it does a lot of client/server background work which accounts for local as well as remote systems.

mv is probably the best choice. If possible, you should try mv directory_old directory_new rather than mv directory_old/* directory_new/. This way, you move one thing instead of a million things.

Answer 2

find src_image_dir/ -type f -name '*.jpg' -print0 | xargs -0r mv -t dst_image_dir/ 

• This will not overflow argument expansion.
• You can specify the file extension, if you want to. (-name ...)
• find -print0 with xargs -0 allows you to use spaces in the names.
• xargs -r will not run mv unless there is something to be moved. (mv will complain if no source files are given).
• The syntax mv -t allows you to specify first the destination and then the source files, needed by xargs.
• Moving the whole directory is of course much faster, since it takes place in constant time regardless of the number of files contained in it, but:
  • the source directory will disappear for a fraction of time and it might create you problems;
  • if the process is using the current directory as output directory (in contrast to always referring to a full path from a non-moving location), you would have to relaunch it. (like you do with log rotation).

By the way, I would ask myself whether I really have to move such a big amount of files at once. Batch processing is overrated. I try not to accumulate huge amounts of work if I can process things at the moment they are generated.

Answer 3

If the two directories reside on the same filesystem, use mv on the DIRECTORY and not the contents of the directory.

If they reside on two different filesystems, use rsync:

rsync -av /source/directory/ /destination

Notice the trailing / on the source. This means it will copy the CONTENTS of the directory and not the directory itself. If you leave the / off, it will still copy the files but they will sit in a directory named /destination/directory. With the /, the files will just be in /destination

rsync will maintain file ownership if you run it as root or if the files are owned by you. It will also maintain the mtime of each individual file.

Answer 4

tar cf - dir1 | (cd dir2; tar xf -)

tar cf - dir1 | ssh remote_host "( cd /path/to/dir2; tar xf - )"

When you use 'cp' each file does a open-read-close-open-write-close. Tar uses different processes for reading and writing as well as multiple treads to operate on multiple files at once. Even on a single CPU box multithreaded apps are faster.

Answer 5

As both directory_old and directory_new are on the same filesystem you could use cp -l instead of mv as an option. cp -l will create a hard links to the original files. When you are done with 'move' and you satisfied with result then you can remove these files from directory_old. in terms of speed it will be same as 'mv' as you first create the links and then you remove the original ones. But this approach let you to start from the beginning if this makes sense

Answer 6

To copy at least ~10k of files (no directories), cp complained with:

unable to execute /bin/cp: Argument list too long

The best option is Rsync:

rsync source target

And it was done very quickly!

Answer 7

If you have the free space, archive them into a single .tar file (with no compression is faster) and then move that file over and unarchive it.

Answer 8

The nature of the destination would determine the most efficient way to do this task. Let's assume you are on a local system, your PWD is / right now. and /acontains the millions of images. Our task is to move all of the images to /b, while maintaining all sub-directory structure. Lets also assume /a and /b are mount points for two different partitions, each on a locally connected disk. We'd want to do this task with a tarpipe. This might take some time, so make sure you're using screen, tmux, or you execute this as a background process.

tar -C /a -cf . | tar -C /b -xf -

That would copy all files and directories in /a to /b, so now you'll need to clean up /a once you confirm it completed without error.

Answer 9

It depends(tm). If your filesystem is copy-on-write, then copy (cp or rsync, for instance) should be comparable to a move. But for most common cases, move (mv) will be the fastest, since it can simply switch around the pieces of data that describe where a file is placed (note: this is overly simplified).

So, on your average Linux installation, I'd go for mv.

EDIT: @Frédéric Hamidi has a good point in the comments: This is only valid if they are both on the same filesystem and disk. Otherwise the data will be copied anyway.