Pre-staging
Although files on tape cartridges is always transparently staged upon access, sometimes it is useful to stage them manually in order to optimize access to multiple files or to prepare data for future use.
The process of manually staging files is called pre-staging.
When users need to fetch multiple files and they know which ones in advance, the efficiency of the staging process can be dramatically improved by telling the archive all the needed files at once. In the following example a user needs the whole directory /archive/users/foo/somedir and the file /archive/users/foo/somefile:
# stage -r /archive/users/foo/somedir /archive/users/foo/somefile
If you want to wait until the recursive stage is finished, use:
# stage -w -r /archive/users/foo/somedir /archive/users/foo/somefile
Please use the first command, using '-r' only (without -w), in order to let SamFS optimize the queue. Then issue the same command with both options '-w -r' and you will get the prompt back when all files are online.
Read the man stage(1) for a detailed description of his options
Note: There is a unexpected side-effect in copying large files without staging them before with 'stage -w' that causes the whole "implicit stage-&-copy" to be 5x-10x slower than if you do it in 2 separate steps!
You may use pre-staging also from the FTP interface. The next example would be using a generic FTP client:
ftp> quote stage -w -r /archive/users/foo/somedir /archive/users/foo/somefile
The quote is needed in order to pass the stage command to the FTP daemon.