problem backing up iMovie files

[Chris Walsh]

when i try to back up an iMovie project to my external drive (by copying it over), i get this: "You cannot copy the Item "Icon" because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display".

yet the file does PARTIALLY copy to the external drive (at least its icon appears), but when i try to open it by double clicking it just launches iMovie but doesn't load the actual project.

i COULD create a full quality QT file of the project and copy that, which would be a bit of a safety, but obviously it wouldn't be including any of my actual edits/timelines/clips, etc...all the stuff that is vital to protect!

there has to be a way of backing up the entire project to another drive- but iMovie's Help doesn't have anything, nor does any iMovie book i scan through in the bookstores.

????

 

[kwajaln]

Time for a visit to the neighborhood Apple Store! That is a strange problem. I regularly back up iMovie projects to an external HD and I have never encountered a problem. Good luck!

 

[Chris Walsh]

Yikes! So no one else has had this problem with iMovie? It seems like such a strange problem for my computer to SPECIFICALLY have.

 

[danny_w]

How is your external hd that you are copying to formatted? iMovie DV files cannot be copied to FAT32 disks because of the file size >4GB limitation of FAT32.

 

[kwajaln]

How is your external hd that you are copying to formatted? iMovie DV files cannot be copied to FAT32 disks because of the file size >4GB limitation of FAT32.

Great point! I am anxious to find out if that was the OP's problem . . . .

 

[skimaxpower]

How is your external hd that you are copying to formatted? iMovie DV files cannot be copied to FAT32 disks because of the file size >4GB limitation of FAT32.

I don't think that should matter. iMovie breaks all video files into approx 1gig incraments. (eg: even if you import a 30 min clip, iMovie will break it into a series of 9 minute clips because that's where it hits the 1 gig mark.)

 

[danny_w]

I don't think that should matter. iMovie breaks all video files into approx 1gig incraments. (eg: even if you import a 30 min clip, iMovie will break it into a series of 9 minute clips because that's where it hits the 1 gig mark.)

I believe this depends on how the movie was created. If importing from a digicam via DV, that is true for iMovie 5 (but not iMovie 4 I don't believe). I know that I converted an mpeg file to DV and editied it in iMove 5, and the resulting DV file from iMove iwas 21GB in length. When I tried to copy this file to a FAT32 disk it stalled (but no error message). This can be confusing. I would sugges checking the sizes of the files that you want to backup; if any of the files is >4GB, the FAT32 won't work and you will have to use HFS.

 

[Chris Walsh]

it doesn't seem to matter how big/small the iMovie file is- i get the same error message, even with a 250 meg file...

and unless i'm mistaken, i didn't format my external drive. i just plugged it in, and started to copy stuff over. and it works fine... except for iMovie files.

 

[danny_w]

Looking at your original message again, the error message would seem to indicate that possibly the file name is incompatible with the destination disk format. If you just plugged the drive in and didn't format it, most likely it is in FAT32 format. If you don't have any information on the external disk that you cannot afford to lose, I would suggest formatting it for HFS using Disk Utility, and then try your backup again.

 

[Chris Walsh]

thanks for the continued advice/support... i tried Disk Utilities, but i didn't see an option to format to HFS. it does seem to be currently formatted for FAT, (not sure what all this means, just reading what Disk Utilities says!) am i to understand that if i DO figure out how to reformat to HFS, i will lose what is currently on the external drive? if so, maybe you can tell me more fully why i would want to do that. what is it about that iMovie error message that causes you to think it's how the drive is formatted? thanks, it's great to always be learning new Mac stuff...

 

[Applespider]

FAT32 is an older file system. It's not as keen on large files - since there weren't as many of them when it was created. It is however still useful since it's the only format that both Macs and Windows can read and write to. Macs can read the Windows NTFS but not write to it and Windows won't have anythign to do with the Mac's HFS+ without additional software.

If you reformat the drive, you will lose what's on there unless you can move them back to your main drive in the interim. If you're not sharing it with a Windows PC, then HFS+ makes more sense - it means that you can Spotlight it (if you want to) and that you can boot from it (if it's FW)

 

[ChrisA]

I'll bet your external backup drive is formatted with a FAT file system. Sometime called "PC format". I think it is possable to have a filename that "works" on one type of drive but not the other.

when i try to back up an iMovie project to my external drive (by copying it over), i get this: "You cannot copy the Item "Icon" because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display".

 

[heydames]

i hear ya! same problem here

i am having the same problem and error message. i am trying to copy an iMovie file to a flash drive and get

you cannot copy the item "Icon" because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display.

i've tried several flash drives / PC / Mac formatted....

UGH.

 

[Texas04]

I have the same problem and this was my solution:

First Drag your iMovie project folder to your External HD once you get the error message click okay then open up the project folder and open up the destination folder on your external
manually copy each file in each folder over, this should work, takes a lil bit but it works, why this way and not just normal way... i have no clue but thats how i do it.

 

[heydames]

sometimes that does work, but not if any transitions, etc have long names. i'm upgrading to 10.4 this AM

 

[aricher]

I always have this problem when trying to back up to our (Linux-based) servers here at work. Very frustrating. I usually end up archiving the files with Stuffit and then copy them to the server.

 

[crdaley]

Problem Copying to older Formats

"You cannot copy the Item "Icon" because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display"

Gday guys, I know this is a late post, but I recently had the exact same error, transfering files from Mac OS X 10.4.6 to Mac OS 9.2.2 and to my Win Xp machine.

I was more interested at the time to get my files to My OS 9 system, and I was having the same error pretty much, so in my research I solved the OS 9 issue, I explain that latter for those who are interested.

Yet with a FAT 32 system, its different. All my OS X files, which are web site files are long files, eg "car_blue_side_r.jpg" and folders with spaces, be a long time mac user, spaces dont mean anything, when then kinda do, hence the problem HA.

So I thought I would do the same thing as I did with the OS 9 system, copy a dmg file to my PC, which worked OK. Then the plan was to convert or try to open the dmg to mount it and copy all the files over to your location on the hard drive, with no errors, (which worked with OS 9 system).

So I found "dmg2iso". Yet it failed converting the image to anything useful, but more research should work out why, or get an app on windows that can open dmg's maybe ?. My goal is to mount the image, then copy the contents to the hard drive which is of a different format, with no problems, like I did to the OS 9 drive.

OS 9

I was wanting to transfer 9 GB of info from from PowerBook 10.4 system to a Beige G3 Server OS 9.2.2, 12 GB HD and 64 MB Ram machine a beast, and still going like a monster. In my research, I found out that OS 9 Disk Copy utility can open dmg files. Now OS 9.2.2, well my anyways came with Disk Copy 6.3.3, no good, found Disk Copy 6.4 (let me know if u need it), and it worked.

Use Disk Utility in OS X as normal to create a new disk image from folder, select your folder of the stuff your want to transfer over, image it. Copy that dmg file to your Mac OS 9 machine, then use Disk Copy version 6.4 to mount it. Once mounted just like in a mounted image in OS X, copy the contents to your Mac OS 9 hard drive, and no errors.

All my OS X files, which are web site files are long files, eg "car_blue_side_r.jpg" and folders with spaces, be a long time mac user, doesn't help with FAT 32 systems, even though I had a similar error that the FAT 32 causes when copying to my Mac OS 9, the older OS 9 was still more forgiving in accepting the spaces and odd symbol.

I'm hoping by mounting the dmg in windows I can copy the files over, with no problems.

Any info would be great, i'm still researching and if anyone's interested let me know.

Cheers !

 

[ronchicago]

Solution?

OK. So the last post was in 2006. But I had the same issue recently on my Mac Tiger. Problem is that with all iVideo projects there are files whose name is "icon" followed by a character that looks like an empty square when viewed from Windows. That file is invisible or not easily seen when on the Mac itself. Windows SP 2 does not handle that filename. I edited the filename, from Windows, removing that last character, and Windows can now copy the file. As far as I can tell, the Mac seems to work well also with that character gone.