unstoppable copier for mac

[ComputerClinic]

I have a MacBook that needed a new Harddrive. I replaced the HD and reinstalled OSX. The old drive is failing but not clicking or anything too serious at this point. When I try to copy data it works fine until a certain point then stops copying.

I was wondering if there was a program similar to roadkil's unstoppable copier or y-copy that I can use to just skip the damaged files. I tried testdisk but It seemed a little complicated and I've already spent enough time on this machine. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ComputerClinic]

FileSync seems to be working OK. If it stalls I'll try Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

When you are dealing with a bad drive like that there isn't much of anything that I've found that is going to skip what it can't copy and move onto what it cannot. That's just the corrupted part or pars of the drive that you hit. Just create a generic user on the machine then go to applications/utilities and try migration assistant. Then go through and try applications by themselves. If they come over fine, try the user folder and see what happens. If its just a few things migration assistant will probably get most everything. If its one larger area, then migration assistant more than likely won't get anything, but you will see in the log of where it was failing that there is most likely a pattern. Its usually always the pictures or music in my experience where the problems occur.

 

[ComputerClinic]

Well FileSync failed half way through with some weird message. But I was able to complete the job using the terminal and "cp -r -n" to copy everything ignoring errors and not overwrite stuff that already copied. The only downside was there was no progress bar or anything to indicate how long it would take. I left it running over night and was able to copy over 100GB of music.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Well FileSync failed half way through with some weird message. But I was able to complete the job using the terminal and "cp -r -n" to copy everything ignoring errors and not overwrite stuff that already copied.

Gotta love those Unix underpinnings!

 

[Mainstay]

Did you ever find a program that does this on a Mac?

I have used ForkLift - but when it fails, it fails the whole copy procedure (deleting everything that has been copied to date!)...

 

[Markverhyden]

Did you ever find a program that does this on a Mac?

I have used ForkLift - but when it fails, it fails the whole copy procedure (deleting everything that has been copied to date!)...

Many of these types of apps use cp type commands. If they are failing the only thing to use is a data recovery type app like R-Studio or prosofteng.com DR4.

 

[Mainstay]

For data recovery, yes, these are a much smarter approach.

But we are usually doing a manual copy of say a users photo collection. If we do a staright copy/paste, 90% of the time a file will have an issue and the copy process fails.

With unstoppable, yes, with a GUI, the transfer would complete and we could then read the report on what failed.

 

[FremontPC]

Has anyone tried Ultracopier for this? I tried it in Sierra and got blocked from running it, didn't want to futz with it further. I wish Migration Assistant would at least let you copy personal files to an earlier version of OSX.

 

[NviGate Systems]

I wrote a utility in Automator for just this issue. Let me fetch the url. It uses cp with switches to ignore files that can't copy. Copies everything in a transfer folder in Documents on the boot drive.

 

[FremontPC]

Great! Thanks, NviGate!

 

[NviGate Systems]

http://pegasys.codeplex.com/releases/view/126239

There is a zipped app that will do the transfer, you simply select the source. It will ask you to select a source folder. Keep in mind that cp will treat the source folder as the root path and hence will NOT create that folder in the destination. So if you wanted to copy say user profiles, keep in mind selecting "users" as the folder will copy everything inside the users folder but won't copy the actual root folder itself. Hope that makes sense.

There is also the Automator source code should you wish to tweak or change the behavior or plain see what commands it's running.

I can't remember if the app is signed or not, I did have a developer ID, but it's been like years since I wrote that tool. You may have to disable gatekeeper.