# Reorganizing after first large backups

**URL:** <https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [January 20, 2025, 6:25pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672 "2025-01-20T18:25:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Scott\_Johnston](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/scott_johnston/32/1369_2.png) [@Scott\_Johnston](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/Scott_Johnston)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2025, 6:25pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/1 "2025-01-20T18:25:46Z")

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Hi. Newbie here.  
My newbie self created a script to back up three mounts from my NAS.  
Oops, the script created a separate repo for each mount. Five days of copying later…  
I think I would prefer a single repo with three sources feeding it, potentially each with their own policies, but sharing dedupe.  
Can I rename the largest repo and then migrate the other two into it?  
Would it be better to create a new repo and migrate all three into it?  
I’m hoping this can be done “locally” on the host that has the repo, rather than from the NAS.

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**Author:** ![kapitainsky](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/kapitainsky/32/535_2.png) [@kapitainsky](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/kapitainsky)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2025, 6:58pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/2 "2025-01-20T18:58:35Z")

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You can use:

> **[snapshot migrate](https://kopia.io/docs/reference/command-line/common/snapshot-migrate/)**
>
> $ kopia snapshot migrate \\ --source-config=... Migrate snapshots from another repository
> Flag Short Default Help --\[no-\]all false Migrate all sources --\[no-\]apply-ignore-rules false When migrating also apply current ignore rules --\[no-\]latest-only...

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**Author:** ![budy](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/budy/32/38_2.png) [@budy](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/budy)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2025, 7:42am UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/3 "2025-01-21T07:42:23Z")

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Are you sure, that you created indeed 3 separate repos? To create a repo, you’d have to go through some serious scripting, when doing that remotely… e.g checking, if the repo already exists before even trying to create a new repo before first run…

Also, since you seem to have a Kopia server running… you’d have to have a separate instance of Kopia server for each repo, since Kopia server only supports one repo per instance…

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**Author:** ![dimejo](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/dimejo/32/287_2.png) [@dimejo](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/dimejo)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2025, 11:04am UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/4 "2025-01-21T11:04:01Z")

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> [@kapitainsky](#):
>
> You can use:
> 
> [snapshot migrate | Kopia](https://kopia.io/docs/reference/command-line/common/snapshot-migrate/)

I wouldn’t recommend using `kopia snapshot migrate` in this case. As this command is basically reading, decrypting, decompressing, compressing, encrypting and writing one snapshot after the other it can be **very slow**. Migrating a 5TB repository took 1 week in my case.

If the repository is just a few days old it’s faster to start from scratch.

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**Author:** ![Scott\_Johnston](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/scott_johnston/32/1369_2.png) [@Scott\_Johnston](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/Scott_Johnston)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2025, 4:05pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/5 "2025-01-21T16:05:42Z")

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Renaming the repo seems to work without issue, allowing me to keep the largest of the three.

Another thing slowing down migration in my case is that the reads and writes are to the same device as opposed to the reads from NAS and writes to backup.

I ended up:  
Renaming the repo to what I want (pool-based rather than mount-point based)  
Creating new snapshots from the NAS to the new repo rather than migrating.  
(In progress.)

Thanks for the feedback, all.

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**Author:** ![Scott\_Johnston](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/scott_johnston/32/1369_2.png) [@Scott\_Johnston](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/Scott_Johnston)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2025, 4:07pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/6 "2025-01-21T16:07:35Z")

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No kopia server.  
Just a script that looped through “kopia repository create” with each mount-point rather than once for the pool and snapshots for each mount-point. Trivially stupid on my part.

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**Author:** ![Scott\_Johnston](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/scott_johnston/32/1369_2.png) [@Scott\_Johnston](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/Scott_Johnston)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2025, 7:49am UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/reorganizing-after-first-large-backups/3672/7 "2025-01-27T07:49:03Z")

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Switched to Kopia server and speed has improved. Didn’t realize how easy server mode would be.
