Transferring Files from a Network Share to Unraid

Open a terminal session with SSH or Telnet to Unraid, and login as root. Create a temporary directory on the server:

mkdir /work

Mount a remote directory to the new directory:

mount -t cifs //workstation/share /work

(Substitute name of your workstation for 'workstation', and it will probably prompt you for a workstation user name/password).

Copy all the files and folders from the workstation's share to a disk share on the server:

cp -r /work/* /mnt/disk1

(Of course you can copy from the workstation share to any disk/share. Eg. /mnt/user/<sharename>)

Edit: Another option is to use rsync to get speed/progress information:

rsync -av --stats --progress /work/ /mnt/disk1/

When done:

umount /work
rmdir /work

Caution: If you have directory or file names with non-English characters, commonly found in titles and names for media files from European and South American countries, I would recommend to use Windows Explorer. The Linux commands either skip the whole file or directory, or replaces the "strange" letter with an underscore. Also, the cp command may set all file attributes to system and hidden, so the files don't show up in Windows Explorer. This may be corrected with chmod command, but I found it better to avoid this altogether by sticking to the Explorer in Windows.

Another method using Netcat and Tar

See also this post for an alternative method of data transfer between Linux systems, such as Unraid.

Unicode issues

If you have any kind of foreign characters in your filenames (for instance, an accented letter in a movie title), you want to mount the cifs share with the UTF-8 option as shown below, otherwise the mount will give you a garbled character when doing the copy/rsync. When this garbling happens, your directory will also be unlistable from a Mac (tested on 10.9) over AFP or SMB.

mount -t cifs //workstation/share /work -o iocharset=utf8

Permission issues after copying

Because your SSH copy or rsync process is typically run as root, you may experience 'Access Denied' messages with users writing to directories that have been created as part of this job. This can be rectified by running the 'New Permissions' job from the tools menu in the web admin after the copy process has completed.