Help transferring from one Mac drive to external drive

We are sending back our Huge System 3200S for repair, so I have purchased
two Western Digital MyBook Pro 500G external firewire drives and hooked them
up to the same system, via firewire, to the Mac with the Huge System Drive.

No problems here so far, both external 500G drives mount with no problem.

Now there is HD footage that is in a directory call Lily 2007, and it is 440.9G
in size and this will fit on one of the MyBook drives.

I followed the Mac OS help and clicked on the folder on the Huge Drive called
Lily 2007, and copied this folder.

I then moved to the drive I named MY BOOK 01, and clicked "paste item"

Next Mac OSX says
"Copying 1,399 items to "MY BOOK 01"...

this works for about 10 seconds
then Mac OSX says

"The operation cannot be completed because an item with the name
"feb 24 2007" already exists.

I assure you this my book is blank, and I tried to copy the same Lily 2007
directory to MY BOOK 2, but is comes up with the same message.


I am not very Mac savvy with the OS so I was wondering if one of
you Mac Gurus can help!

You can drag and drop between drives - no need to copy and paste in such large chunks.

If possible, I would delete everything that is on the MY BOOK and empty the trash. Then open a window for the Huge drive and a window for the MY BOOK and set them up side by side on the desktop. Then drag each folder from the huge drive to the MY BOOK. If it says that file already exists, choose to replace it with the one you are copying over. Once you're done moving everything, open the folders side by side to check that the number and type of files is identical on each drive. As a precaustion, test any files that gave you alerts (like the feb 24 2007 one) on the new drive by opening them on the new drive.

Be aware of naming protocols for Unix (mac OSX is a type of unix) - no symbols like / or ? or .

Also, are the new drives native mac drives, or is it possible they are not formatted correctly? I mean - are they external drives you bought as after market add ons that have not been specifically formatted for Mac?

Hi! Natively they come ready to roll for the Mac (or PC)
they are the Western Digital My Book Pro drives.
Thet run on the firewire 800 ports at the back of the Mac.

I will try your method and advise you on what happened.

thanks
Mark Pigott
Sarnia, Ontario, Canada




Jude Cotter Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You can drag and drop between drives - no need to
> copy and paste in such large chunks.
>
> If possible, I would delete everything that is on
> the MY BOOK and empty the trash. Then open a
> window for the Huge drive and a window for the MY
> BOOK and set them up side by side on the desktop.
> Then drag each folder from the huge drive to the
> MY BOOK. If it says that file already exists,
> choose to replace it with the one you are copying
> over. Once you're done moving everything, open the
> folders side by side to check that the number and
> type of files is identical on each drive. As a
> precaustion, test any files that gave you alerts
> (like the feb 24 2007 one) on the new drive by
> opening them on the new drive.
>
> Be aware of naming protocols for Unix (mac OSX is
> a type of unix) - no symbols like / or ? or .
>
> Also, are the new drives native mac drives, or is
> it possible they are not formatted correctly? I
> mean - are they external drives you bought as
> after market add ons that have not been
> specifically formatted for Mac?

It does the same thing with the suggested drag and drop and I can see from the FCP file structure what is happening.

On the original Lily2007, if I open finder

>audio render files
>feb 24 2007
>feb 25 2007

>autosave vault
>autosave vault
>feb 24 2007
>feb 24 2007

etc

See how there are two feb 24 2007 entries in the autosave vault

the OSx sees this an aborts, it gives me no option to overwrite
Win Os would do the same thing.

My boss set up this structure to his movie so I'll have speak about renaming
one of the directories

>>Hi! Natively they come ready to roll for the Mac (or PC) <<

The Lacies say that they are ready to run on Mac or PC too. This means they are formatted for the PC and can run on the Mac, not that they are in MAC os extended format. Mac OS extended is much better for video on the Mac. Check it out, anyway - just open disk utility (Applications > Utilities > Disc Utility) and find out what the formatting is on the WD external.

1000 points to you!
It says the MyBook drives are MS-DOS formatted.
I started to wonder, as all my 4+GB movies would not transfer.
So, how does one format for Mac ?



Jude Cotter Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> >>Hi! Natively they come ready to roll for the Mac
> (or PC) <<
>
> The Lacies say that they are ready to run on Mac
> or PC too. This means they are formatted for the
> PC and can run on the Mac, not that they are in
> MAC os extended format. Mac OS extended is much
> better for video on the Mac. Check it out, anyway
> - just open disk utility (Applications > Utilities
> > Disc Utility) and find out what the formatting
> is on the WD external.

There's some instructions on how to do this in the FAQ here : I can't capture files over 2GB