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I moved the Music folder to my external hard drive but

F

Flac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 28, 2015
107
0
I am not sure if nothing was lost in the process.

I still haven't deleted the original Music folder on my MBP. It had about 30GB of memory usage and I almost have my SSD full, so I decided to move it.

In the middle of it it said there was an error but I didn't read what it was and clicked ok (I think it was just one file that didn't move).

When I woke up after I slept while moving it it said 20 minutes left till completion. And then when I checked it afterwards the window showing the moving of files was gone, so I guess it was complete now.

I'm shy to delete the music folder though because I'm afraid maybe not everything may have been copied.

How can I check if the two folders' contents are identical?
 
Open the Terminal.app in the Utilities folder then type in and hit enter key.

Code: 
rsync -avP --dry-run /Users/User_Name/Music /Volumes/External_Drive_Name/

This would be if the Music folder is at the root of the new drive you would want to change the name of the external to what you see in finder or on the Desktop and to your user name in the first part. Rsync is a program which will exactly copy all files and compare that the copy is correct ensuring that every file in the source directory is on the new copy. If it shows you that it needs to copy some files to the new remove the --dry-run to actually do it.
 
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MacUser2525 said:
Open the Terminal.app in the Utilities folder then type in and hit enter key.

Code: 
rsync -avP --dry-run /Users/User_Name/Music /Volumes/External_Drive_Name/

This would be if the Music folder is at the root of the new drive you would want to change the name of the external to what you see in finder or on the Desktop and to your user name in the first part. Rsync is a program which will exactly copy all files and compare that the copy is correct ensuring that every file in the source directory is on the new copy. If it shows you that it needs to copy some files to the new remove the --dry-run to actually do it.
Click to expand...

Wow that seems a bit complicated. How did you learn to do things like that?
 
Flac said:
Wow that seems a bit complicated. How did you learn to do things like that?
Click to expand...

Well being an old fart who started using computers before they had the fancy GUI I am unafraid of the command line. In fact I prefer it most times as it is usually quicker to just switch to a terminal which I always have open and get things done. I used Linux for many years before making the switch to OSX where being the paranoid about my data type that I am I ran across rsync that I have mentioned makes sure you have exact copy of your data for backups. There are GUI for rsync like DropSync that will allow you to click buttons to get same thing done they are slower and by the time you setup the synced directories you will be half way done the command line version of the command.
 
OP:

Having the music on -one- external drive IS NOT ENOUGH.

All drives will eventually fail.
Some will fail sooner than expected.

If your external drive fails (with your music on it), and you have no backup, where will you be?

You can wait and learn more about this "the hard way", or get a SECOND external drive, and clone the contents of the "primary external drive" to the "secondary external backup drive".

Much better that way!
 
Fishrrman said:
OP:

Having the music on -one- external drive IS NOT ENOUGH.

All drives will eventually fail.
Some will fail sooner than expected.

If your external drive fails (with your music on it), and you have no backup, where will you be?

You can wait and learn more about this "the hard way", or get a SECOND external drive, and clone the contents of the "primary external drive" to the "secondary external backup drive".

Much better that way!
Click to expand...

Indeed a good point all my media is a triple really I have running copy of it then two backups on ZFS filesytems machines (which has checksums of the data making it better than most FS), as I said I am damn paranoid of the safety of my data accumulated over the decades.
 
Fishrrman said:
OP:

Having the music on -one- external drive IS NOT ENOUGH.

All drives will eventually fail.
Some will fail sooner than expected.

If your external drive fails (with your music on it), and you have no backup, where will you be?

You can wait and learn more about this "the hard way", or get a SECOND external drive, and clone the contents of the "primary external drive" to the "secondary external backup drive".

Much better that way!
Click to expand...
I do this as well. First thing I did when I got my new MBP was to buy an external drive to download all my music from iTunes Match on to. I still have it on an external on my Mac Mini.

I can't tell you how many drives have failed on me over the years.

Every Seagate drive has failed on me and I no longer own any BUT not every WD drive has failed on me. I have several from 2008 still running strong that I had installed in a 2008 Mac Pro back then.
 
JackieInCo said:
I do this as well. First thing I did when I got my new MBP was to buy an external drive to download all my music from iTunes Match on to. I still have it on an external on my Mac Mini.

I can't tell you how many drives have failed on me over the years.

Every Seagate drive has failed on me and I no longer own any BUT not every WD drive has failed on me. I have several from 2008 still running strong that I had installed in a 2008 Mac Pro back then.
Click to expand...

Agreed Seagate has went down hill all the 7200.11 bar one I have had failed on me, still have a 160gb from many moons ago and a 400gb that makes and always had an ungodly noise when the heads move run perfectly. A few of the many WDs I have had failed but nothing in comparison to the Seagate. I will not buy them no matter how cheap they are now and I am one damn tight SOB with my money...
 
MacUser2525 said:
Open the Terminal.app in the Utilities folder then type in and hit enter key.

Code: 
rsync -avP --dry-run /Users/User_Name/Music /Volumes/External_Drive_Name/

This would be if the Music folder is at the root of the new drive you would want to change the name of the external to what you see in finder or on the Desktop and to your user name in the first part. Rsync is a program which will exactly copy all files and compare that the copy is correct ensuring that every file in the source directory is on the new copy. If it shows you that it needs to copy some files to the new remove the --dry-run to actually do it.
Click to expand...

It says no such file or directory.

For External_Drive_name I put WDMyCloud.
 
By the way I found 'mobilesync' folder that is taking up about 16GB of space. If I moved this to the external would it still be useable? And how could I make further backups automatically replace the backup in the external instead of making a new backup in the internal SSD?
 
Flac said:
It says no such file or directory.

For External_Drive_name I put WDMyCloud.
Click to expand...

That means you have the name of one part incorrect try to start typing the first part of the name like /Use then hit tab key it will complete to at least the /Users/ if you have more than one a twice hitting tab will give you list of them for completion. Start typing in the first letter of the user name and hit tab to complete then M for music hit tab again to complete and then backspace to remove the / now space key then /Vo and tab again to complete that and W tab key for the last time for its name and enter key to run the command.
 
Here, the '~' character comes in handy...

rsync -avP --dry-run ~/Music /Volumes/WDMyCloud/
 
jerwin said:
Here, the '~' character comes in handy...

rsync -avP --dry-run ~/Music /Volumes/WDMyCloud/
Click to expand...

Indeed short for your home directory or /Users/Username but the OP (and Mac users in general) is/are struggling enough with the command line I did not want to introduce funky characters to him/her.

Edit: Let alone the idea of using quotes so there is no chance of a space not being escaped properly in a directory path. What a mess Apple did there break decades of Unix tradition for windows refugees Christ and don't get me going on the case insensitive part of that equation as well.
 
i didn't get the user name wrong. i checked whoami and it is the same as what i put in before.
 
Flac said:
i didn't get the user name wrong. i checked whoami and it is the same as what i put in before.
Click to expand...
In the terminal.

Code: 
ls -l /Volumes/WDMyCloud/

Post it here so we can see the output it looks like the folder that should be named Music is not at the root of that drive. Either that or you have space in the user name. To get by that it would need to change to /Users/Space\ In\ Name/Music in the command line or "/Users/Space In Name/Music" for it to work.
 
I just deleted the music folder because I needed the space and I was getting impatient. But when I tried to add all the files back to iTunes I thought the memory of the music files would stay in the external but as the songs are being added to the music library (I did CMD+O and added the whole music folder that is now in the external), the memory is decreasing by the giga byte.
 
Flac said:
I just deleted the music folder because I needed the space and I was getting impatient. But when I tried to add all the files back to iTunes I thought the memory of the music files would stay in the external but as the songs are being added to the music library (I did CMD+O and added the whole music folder that is now in the external), the memory is decreasing by the giga byte.
Click to expand...

You need to go into the Preferences and uncheck Copy files to iTunes library under the Advanced tab or it will just copy all them back.
 
MacUser2525 said:
You need to go into the Preferences and uncheck Copy files to iTunes library under the Advanced tab or it will just copy all them back.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure that about 4 GB is reduced but when　I look at the iTunes folder within the music folder in the internal drive it only adds up to 1 GB. What could account for this? Thank you, I will uncheck the copy files.
 
Last edited:
Flac said:
I'm pretty sure that about 4 GB is reduced but when　I look at the iTunes folder within the music folder in the internal drive it only adds up to 1 GB. What could account for this? Thank you, I will uncheck the copy files.
Click to expand...

I came back from somewhere and when I checked it it had only 4 GB left when it had about 30GB left when I deleted the music folder. It said that there is not enough space to recording on ScreenFlow so maybe I left it on but when I stopped it nothing was recorded and I deleted it but the remaining storage space still remains at about 4GB. Is there some sort of hidden folder that ScreenFlow is saving to?

Never mind it says 37 GB after restarting the computer.
 
Last edited:
Flac said:
By the way I found 'mobilesync' folder that is taking up about 16GB of space. If I moved this to the external would it still be useable? And how could I make further backups automatically replace the backup in the external instead of making a new backup in the internal SSD?
Click to expand...

Yes you can put the MobileSync/Backup folder on an external, but you need to put a symlink in the original location pointing iTunes to the external. I do this and it works fine. New backups and updated backups are put on the external.

MobileSync/Backup has all the backups of your iDevices, so is used if you need to restore from a backup.
 
Mike Boreham said:
Yes you can put the MobileSync/Backup folder on an external, but you need to put a symlink in the original location pointing iTunes to the external. I do this and it works fine. New backups and updated backups are put on the external.

MobileSync/Backup has all the backups of your iDevices, so is used if you need to restore from a backup.
Click to expand...
How do you put a symlink?
 
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