The HDP version of the source and destination clusters can determine which type of file systems should be used to read the source cluster and write to the destination cluster.

For example, when copying data from a 1.x cluster to a 2.x cluster, it is impossible to use “hdfs” for both the source and the destination, because HDP 1.x and 2.x have different RPC versions, and the client cannot understand both at the same time. In this case the WebHdfsFilesystem (webhdfs://) can be used in both the source and destination clusters, or the HftpFilesystem (hftp://) can be used to read data from the source cluster.