Questions[copying](server)

I'm wondering which file transfer protocols available on Linux support server-side copying (and doesn't internally download and reupload files). The simplest use case I have is for copying large files (such as VMs) from one directory to another on the same share.

I know Samba 4.1.0 recently implemented support for FSCTL_SRV_COPYCHUNK in the SMB2 protocol, but as far as I know, no client-side tool/file manager supports this yet (link). I've also looked at AFP, but the only two Linux tools for mounting AFP shares are gvfs-afp and afpfs-ng and neither are too great. afpfs-ng is unmaintained and doesn't cooperate well with netatalk (segfaults), while gvfs-afp has very low throughput compared to afpfs-ng when it works. Update: it looks like the next version of NFS might support this too.

Are there any other protocols that support server-side copying?

Thanks in advance!

It's quite easy to backup a real drive to VHD, e.g. with Sysinternal's Disk2VHD on XP or with Windows Image Backup on Windows 7. But how do I copy that file back?

It's possible by booting a recovery CD or the Windows installation DVD. But can it also be done from a running operation system? Can it be scripted?

We want to clone a drive to another drive daily using this.

I have a list of files I need to copy on a Linux system - each file ranges from 10 to 100GB in size.

I only want to copy to the local filesystem. Is there a way to do this in parallel - with multiple processes each responsible for copying a file - in a simple manner?

I can easily write a multithreaded program to do this, but I'm interested in finding out if there's a low level Linux method for doing this.

I want to copy a file from my machine A to server C, but only have access to server C through server B.

Instead of first transferring to server B, log in and then transfer to server C, Is is possible to transfer the file directly with SCP or similar programs?

(Emacs tramp-mode has this feature for editing files remotely).

I soon will have a folder with thousands of files, each file on the order of a few KB. I will need to transfer these across a Windows network from one UNC share to another. In general, is it faster to simply copy the files over en masse, or would it be faster to zip them up (e.g., using 7zip in fastest mode) and send one or a few large files? Or is there no difference in practice?