Moving files to another drive

[wideangle]

Is it safe to copy data over from 1 drive to another just by using COPY>PASTE even if the files transferred are massive (eg - 1TB) I always had this idea you should only transfer in small batches....

[Wayne]

Safe to do, but unless you have copious ram and huge page file (assume Windows OS) you may have out of memory errors and it won't succeed as copy > paste operations are via the clipboard. It will also take a month of wet Sundays...

Why not use the move option??

[arthurking83]

Yep safe!

BUT!..... tedious depending on the amount of data.

I'm assuming you're using Wondows?

If so, and you have hundreds of gigs of files, it can take up to 10 hours or more.. even on internal drives!

I doubt you have any individual files that are 1Tb in size, so I'm assuming that you may have 1Tb of data to transfer.

I did that once from a USB drive to an eSATA drive and it took over 24hours to transfer(990+Megabytes of data).. wayyy slow.

The problem with Windows copy and paste is that each file gets transferred individually and hence can be slower to fully transfer if you have a fast drive connection(internal).
If the drive transfer speed is limited due to connection type(ie. USB) then there's not much you can do about it!

For better speed, I use this Richcopy program I've previously referred too, that allows multiple threading, where you can simultaneously copy more than 1 file at a time, and hence reduce transfer time considerably.

I've tried various thread numbers, and for small files, like jpgs, using 10 threads definitely speeds up transfer speeds, but I usually only transfer larger raw files and so have settled on only 2 threads to max out the transfer speed possible for all drives. I can get up to 40Mb/s transferring from internal drive to eSATA(but for some reason as low as 20Mb/s too), and only up to about 15Mb/s when transferring to USB drive(but generally 10Mb/s)

Do the math on that and you will soon find out that transferring 1Tb of data is slow and tedious.

FWIW, I once tried to copy a large amount of data in Win7 using copy and paste to my USB drive and gave up after a few minutes.. it said over 1 week to transfer the entire 1Tb lot... not while I'm alive it wont!

IF the drives aren't part of the main system drive, you may also be able to do an image backup. That is use soem program to create an image of the data already on one drive and then transfer that image to the other drive. Don't know if this is any speedier or not, but it's supposed to have full data integrity.

[wideangle]

So how on earth is the general public going to get around these kinds of issues when years down the track they are going to have many TB of data? So short of copying a whole TB of data over in 1 go, another simply way of doing it would be to copy files over in smaller batches (say 50GB at a time). Thanks for the program links, I will check them out.

On the note of backup software that creates an image, I would be interested to know if this could be used to mirror the data back onto another drive, as this could work very quickly.

[Wayne]

If you create a disc image, you can mount the image later on as a virtual disc, or some applications will allow you to restore from it.

[peterking]

There is backup data and then there is NTI Shadow.
This sits in the background and, depending on the parameters you set, Copies every file that is created or changed as you do it. Can be a drag on system resources so as a general rule of thumb if I am downloading images off the camera then I disable it till I am finished. Then let it do it's job.

[brindyman]

I use Teracopy

^ x2 for teracopy

[wideangle]

There is backup data and then there is NTI Shadow.
This sits in the background and, depending on the parameters you set, Copies every file that is created or changed as you do it. Can be a drag on system resources so as a general rule of thumb if I am downloading images off the camera then I disable it till I am finished. Then let it do it's job.

So with software such as backup programs, can you create a mirror image of the hard drive, and then put that mirror onto another drive at a much quicker time than it would to manually copy and paste manually?

[peterking]

So with software such as backup programs, can you create a mirror image of the hard drive, and then put that mirror onto another drive at a much quicker time than it would to manually copy and paste manually?

Compressed Backup. Not without a lot of work.
Copy, such as Shadow. Yes. It is a copy not a compressed backup.