Depending on the setup, moves &#x2F; exporting &#x2F; snapshots can be helped by fancy-shmancy file systems that allow snapshots (well LVM does too but I hear it is slow). But generally means BTRFS or ZFS. The pattern is to create a read-only snapshot of directory. Then feed that snapshot to tar (maybe apply some mild compression on it depending on your tradeoffs).  Then delete snapshot.<p>Even better directly use BTRFS (or ZFS) send &#x2F; recv to send to move to another system with that file system.<p>Can also pipe tar directly to something like nc. Remember benchmarked moving a large number of files on a LAN and tar + nc came out as the winner over say rsync or scp. It saturated 1Gbps connection pretty close to its maximum expected capacity.<p>You&#x27;d obviously not expect user to do that by hand and would write tools to do it.