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Is it risky to copy 500 GB "in one drop"?

Flying Llama

Flying Llama

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I have 500 GB that need to be copied over, from one external HD to another.

This guy I was talking to was convinced that copying the entire folder "in one swoop" would be risky, and that there would be mistakes in the copied data.

Is this true? Is it better to copy chunks myself, and to wait for each chunk to finish before moving on?
 
I wouldn't worry so much about the data being copied over properly. You might want to think about the pressure you will put on the drives, constantly writing and reading for hours. Depending on the age and quality of your drives, they might be up to it but you might want to do it in groups, maybe 100 GB? Give the drives a bit of a break in between groups.
Just my $0.02

Some will tell you this will be no problem.
 
I wouldn't be too worried about it, I've copied over huge amounts of data between drives before and never had a problem.
 
haha... my sig isn't code, it's just an image.

thanks everyone for the input. i'll trust these rather new lacie hard drives to copy 500 gb in one drop.
 
Flying Llama said:
haha... my sig isn't code, it's just an image.

thanks everyone for the input. i'll trust these rather new lacie hard drives to copy 500 gb in one drop.
Click to expand...

hmmm...Lacie, don't say that word. I've had bad luck with them.

But putting aside the brand, you'll probably be fine with the transfer, assuming they're a bunch of small-ish files.
 
Gregg2 said:
I tried to "go unfocused" to see an image, but I'm not getting past the two capital Ls at first... probably not what I'm supposed to see.
Click to expand...

I don't know if you're joking or not. But their signature spells LLama. Look at their username.

Flying Llama said:
haha... my sig isn't code, it's just an image.

thanks everyone for the input. i'll trust these rather new lacie hard drives to copy 500 gb in one drop.
Click to expand...

You should be fine, let us know the result 🙂
 
It will mac laptops get very hot for a very long time. It's better to do it in 50 gb increments over the course of a day.
 
vistadude said:
It will mac laptops get very hot for a very long time. It's better to do it in 50 gb increments over the course of a day.
Click to expand...

Think about it for a moment, how much data do you copy over during the original Time Machine backup? Hundreds of GB for many users.
 
It takes me 2.5 hours to time machine 440GBytes of data on a firewire 800 drive. I'd do it all at once... not a big deal.
 
I wouldn't get too worried about it.

I know there is a Mac program similar to the fantastic Windows TeraCopy which verifies file-by-file and allows you to restart a large file transfer exactly where it failed/dropped off.
 
I sure as hell wouldn't trust the finder to do it.

If you are going to do it, do it from the terminal.

What's more, if something goes wrong, you can just continue.

eg :

cp -Rnv <source> <dest>
 
Alright, everything seems to have copied correctly. Of course, even the tiniest mistake will only manifest itself at the worst time in the future. 🙄

(I'm sure these hard drives were designed for such transfers.)

The terminal idea was good, but I had already done it through the Finder.

Thanks again
 
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