ON THE FRUSTRATIONS OF MANAGING PERSONAL MEDIA

"ARRGGHH"

Copying the contents of one folder to another is one of the most basic of computer functions. 

Yet, almost three decades into the personal computing revolution, it's a task that vexes us regardless of whether it's a Windows or an Apple Mac operating system.

Let me explain.

I have a 30 Gigabyte folder which has dozens of folders and hundreds of video clips within them (both AVI and Quicktime, for those who care).  These comprise a collection of small video clips from a series of events important to me, collected over the last few years.

This folder exists on a PowerPC Mac for now. 

Thinking it may be a good idea to have a copy of this folder backed up on both Windows and Mac, I decided to copy it onto an external drive.

The dialog box informed me that it was going to take a while to do this, so I went off to do other chores.

Upon return, I found a message box telling me that the filed named "xyz43" could not be copied, with a cryptic error code "(-36)".

What was utterly frustrating though was that the entire copy operation STOPPED because the operating system had a problem with ONE of thousands of files in all these folders. 

It didn't have the ability to skip over the bad file, continue to copy the rest of the files and finish the task.  I wasn't even asking for a list of the bad files it couldn't copy at the end, although that probably is WAY TOO MUCH to ask for.

I then spent then next few hours copying the contents of the master folder onto the backup drive, sub-folder by sub-folder, file by file.

I didn't want to miss any file, however unimportant. 

At the end of the process, I had about half a dozen video clips, both Quicktime and AVI, that were "bad" files, in that they could not be copied.

I then tried to see if I could replicate this issue of a big Copy task stopping totally in it's tracks because of one file, on a Windows machine in the house.

This time, another big folder of video files, this time "only" 15 Gigabytes, and sure enough, Windows XP did the exact same thing when it found a bad file that it was "unable to copy".

Not having a Vista machine, I've not been able to see if this "choke on a bad file and stop the entire copying process" episode can be replicated on that operating system.

But to have the most recent versions of both Windows XP and Mac operating systems choke on big copying tasks because of specific bad files, is pretty frustrating.

Especially in an age, when mainstream users are increasingly confronting not just files with a few hundred word processing and spreadsheet documents, but gigabytes of video, photo and music data.

In the old days, when my mother went through her shoebox of hundreds of photos, if a photo fell to the floor, there would be a 99% probability that someone would find it, and tell her about it, so that it could be returned to the shoe-box.

In today's world of unending disk drives, memory cards, back-up drives and the myriad photo/video/music management application programs, you'd never know if a DOZEN shoeboxes of photos, videos or music tracks that "fell on the floor" as it were, lost forever, as we constantly try to keep all this stuff organized, backed-up, and useful, all the while sharing it with friends, family, and the world at large.

And this is but a tiny bit of the issues I'm having managing all my personal media (videos, photos, music), across dozens of old and new computers (PCs and Macs), countless cameras, camcorders and mp3 players, and a myriad copies of software applications, each with their own types of library and file storage formats, unfolding over a series of versions of those applications over the years.

Not to mention many of those music and video files have DRM (digital rights management), that restrict how many computers and devices they can be used on, backed up on, and generally transitioned to new storage media over time.

This is a pressing problem that could sustain a handful of startup companies.  It's a problem that is only going to get exponentially worse for billions of people going forward.

Coming back to my prosaic file copying problem above, I'm sure there are utilities out there for both OSes that enable copying large files without choking on the bad files, but at the moment, I'm too tired and frustrated to go looking for them.

So I thought I'd blog about it and share the pain. 

If there's a basic, easy, "Duh" solution I'm missing, please do enlighten me. 

Thanks.

Comments

[candice]

Copy in the unix shell on the Mac instead? The unix tools tend to be more forgiving of stuff you can't do, erroring and carrying on.

cp -rp DirectoryOfStuff Wherever

[Mo]

Put all those files in an archive(zip, rar, tar..) without compression and than transfer it.