sharewindows
I am accessing a shared folder on another machine using Windows Explorer. I find that moving a large file in that folder into a sub-folder takes a very long time. Is the file actually being copied to the new location and then deleted from the old one? Or is there another reason why it takes so long?
Note: The same operation on a local folder takes a fraction of a second since a new copy of the file is not created at all. Only the directory entries are modified.
This is because FAT32 has 2 second resolution for last write times.
In other words, what you're seeing is a limitation of the file system: it can't store last modified times accurately to the second.
Your synchronisation program is going to have to allow a window of a few seconds when comparing dates or use another method to work out which files to copy. You could checksum the files to compare the contents; if you don't have too many files this can be reasonably fast.
Best Answer
When you use a CIFS share, moving a file inside the share should act similar to the local case, except there is something like DFS involved, where the file actually has to be copied on the server from one location to another.
DFS means that you see a single directory tree that could consist of shares on totally different servers. Something similar would be the case if different disks are mounted into a common tree on a Samba server and you move a file from one mount point to another.