Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: lightstand on December 08, 2010, 09:31:38 pm
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I was wondering if someone would walk me through the proper procedures for transferring files from one hard drive to another while validating the the transfer. Can I do this manually with just the utilities that come with OS 10.6(apple) or do I need a specific software to do this? I really don't want to buy a piece of software just to transfer files.
The reason for the question is all the recent talk about validating files and my need to transfer large amounts of backup files from external hard drives to internal hard drives so I can then erase the external drives, but I must know that the files are in good working order.
Yes I am a complete beginner/novice when it comes to computer procedures and appreciate any help that can be given. thanks, jeff
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short of opening the files and looking at them, you could do a md5checksum and comparison. There are batch utilities to do so. search on md5sum or md5cksum.
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TeraCopy - a free utility - can be set to error check after copying or moving.
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Jeff
I would recommend Carbon Copy Cloner, it carries out verification. It is donationware and all the features work in demo mode. I have been using it for several years and thoroughly recommend it. If you find it useful please consider donating. The program can be found at http://www.bombich.com/ccc_features.html (http://www.bombich.com/ccc_features.html).
Are you wanting to copy the files once, perhaps to move to a larger disc, or for backup. If not for backup I would STRONGLY recommend that you setup a frequent backup procedure (sorry if my assumption about not backing up is wrong). CCC is one possible tool for doing this. I use CCC for copying disks and for system disk backup as it can create bootable copies, I also use EMC Retrospect for archival backup as it allows me to store snapshots that enable me to revert to earlier versions of data or software, however this is a more complex and expensive solution. I stress the need for frequent backups as I had the bad experience of a failed hard disc in my laptop and then found that my backup was two months old, this took plenty of time to fix although it would have been worse without any backup and I did have backups of my raw photos but lost some work done in Adobe Lightroom (the latest LR catalogue backup was on the same hard disc).
Regards
Nigel
PS I have no connection with Bombich software other than as a satisfied customer and yes, I have donated.
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You can use the COPY command with the /V switch. Oh wait, that's on a PC. Sorry.
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In OS X, your best and most robust method would be the Rsync utility.
for detailed usage do "man rsync" in terminal (or google it).
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There are many softwares, filezilla 3.5 can do this.
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After copying, from terminal window, run:
diff -qr /path/to/volume1 /path/to/volume2