Do you ever bank up file transfers?

[Cannedkoala]

Hey,

You can select a whole bunch of files and transfer them to another drive all at once, the Mac goes through them sequentially etc.

Additionally though, you can select a second bunch to transfer and it adds a second stream of at the same time.


Is it bad to do this? As far as fragmentation and overall speed goes - I imagine there is a bit more overhead as it has to manage multiple file streams. I really want to do it because I think "this file..here..this file..here..this file etc..." but it feels indescribably like a bad idea so I usually do the cmd-select and copy all at once or I wait for the previous one to finish before I start the next.

Maybe there is a setting so it won't start that second stream until the first one finishes? Like a queue.

 

[Mumford]

You can copy either way. You won't copy twice as fast because the writes to the drive are still done one-at-a-time... unless you're copying to separate external drives or you have some kind of RAID set up.

You might see a bit of slow-down if you set up a bunch of parallel copies simply from buffers being inefficiently used, or from task switching overhead. But setting up a couple of large copies at the same time before going to bed won't break your computer.

I'm not aware of a way to queue up copies without using some kind of scripting/automator.

And don't worry about disk fragmentation. That was a problem 10 years ago, it's not a problem now.