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Topic: Move entire HDD content (music) to another (Read 10327 times) previous topic - next topic
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Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Hello!

Im planning to replace an external hdd by another, bigger one.
Besides many files, the old hdd contents many audio files, merely flac, that i ripped from vinyls, many stuff i did by myself etc.
In other words, for me the files have a very high value.

Now, simply moving the content via win7 from one to another hdd makes me wonder, if there is the chance of any writing errors or anything like that.

As many times, when youre not very familiar with one topic I wonder, if theres a certain procedure "garanteeing" the best way to copy files with the danger of corruption etc.
Besides, this topic also regards this whole maintainance issue of digital information, like will my data some day get lost simple by being stored on a hdd?

Well this is a thing, I de be happy with to read some articles, if you know anything, Id be happy if ud share it.

At first I wondern, if this copy past thing is enough, am I just too hysterical, or is there certain information, that would help me out ?


Best regards
Chris

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #1
Take a look at the XCOPY command with the /V (verify) switch.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #2
I am using XXCOPY (not xcopy -- notice the double X). But, it creates fragmented files. Therefore, I would usually first do a drag'n'drop copy, and when that is completed, I do XXCOPY fromdisk:\ todisk:\  /BACKUP/CDU which bit-verifies (not only checksum-verifies) and overwrites if it finds differences.

Quote
Besides, this topic also regards this whole maintainance issue of digital information, like will my data some day get lost simple by being stored on a hdd?

You do have a backup, don't you?

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #3
...
Quote
Besides, this topic also regards this whole maintainance issue of digital information, like will my data some day get lost simple by being stored on a hdd?

You do have a backup, don't you?

If you don't have a backup that should be your first priority. HDDs do fail in ways that can corrupt your data, and they can fail in ways that make all your data inaccessible without extraordinary measures.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #4
I'd recommend Total Commander, using its built in feature to "synchronize directories by content".

http://www.ghisler.ch/wiki/index.php/Synchronize_directories

That way, each file gets verified byte by byte and on top of that is TC using an own copy method to pre-allocate the file space before copying the actual data for avoiding fragmentation on the destination volume.



Cheers,
Maggi


Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #6
You do have a backup, don't you?


In the unluckily case he hasn't: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...ng-term_archive 

The "media" section of that wiki article may be a little outdated.

For a simple solution another external HDD or a NAS is going to be much more convenient and cost-effective than any of those other forms of media.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #7
Quote
The "media" section of that wiki article may be a little outdated.

Indeed. DVDR is now much cheaper than CDR per megabyte, and BDR has about reached parity with DVDR. Not that I would use any of these for backup. HDD is just way too convenient.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #8
I’d recommend TeraCopy (with verify option) for the initial copy and ExactFile for regular verification.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #9
Looking at these replies and having moved several hundreds of GB around on my computers with Windows shell makes me wonder: Has anyone actually had errors while writing that slipped unnoticed? (On a healthy drive, that is)

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #10
Looking at these replies and having moved several hundreds of GB around on my computers with Windows shell makes me wonder: Has anyone actually had errors while writing that slipped unnoticed? (On a healthy drive, that is)


I never do any of this (except for backups obviously  ) and have never had any issues in many years of just using normal Windows copying.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #11
I have migrated my /install/ folder across several computers and drives over the years and have never had an error due to a corrupt executable. I'm going to out on a limb and say it's no different for my media and project files.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #12
Has anyone actually had errors while writing that slipped unnoticed? (On a healthy drive, that is)


You want to know when a drive is about to fail too. Last four years I've had four or five HDD failures (the possible fifth not sorted out yet, might be just a file system corruption -- it is my OS disk so I have just backed it up and continue running). Disregarding the ten-year-old (I used to store downloaded OS images on those) and the brand-new DOA, then for both of the two remaining ones, then bit-verification of copying has been precisely what has told me that the drives were about to fail. (There might very well have been a Windows bubble warning about delay write failed, but I wasn't staring on the screen for the entire eight hours and I don't want to rely on that.)

I've also had a couple of cases where a USB bridge failed, corrupting the file system (NTFS, unknown version, but on XP MCE or XP SP2 or SP3), but the drive itself was OK. Again, bit-verification was precisely what warned me that the data were not written correctly.


It should be mentioned that some utilities might give you some false positives due to timestamps -- at least, there is a known issue between FAT and NTFS (local time vs UTC). Some utilities will first look at the timestamp, find that the recently copied-to target file looks older than the source, and then overwrite, without checking that the files are actually different.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #13
A couple of points

1)For a gui showing progress, teracopy is fine for the first copy
2)As Porcus points out, timestamps can vary between FAT and NTFS, (some copy programs have a flag that relates this to USB drives). It is important and in most cases it is worth ticking. Some progs check both timestamp and size.

Personally I use RoboCopy for my backup and have written nice little batch files for this. If you want to scedule you can get Win7 to schedule these. Robocopy is built into win7 and has many different switches, but has no gui (shame), but it has good logging, which I like.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #14
Looking at these replies and having moved several hundreds of GB around on my computers with Windows shell makes me wonder: Has anyone actually had errors while writing that slipped unnoticed? (On a healthy drive, that is)


Assuming the rest of your computer is healthy then no.  The most likely cause is bad memory.  If you are paranoid run memtest86 for a while.

Even bad/failing hard drives are very unlikely to corrupt your data in a way that you won't notice.  More often they will just make your data inaccessible.  In almost all cases I've seen where someone has claimed that a drive corrupted their data silently the real cause was bad memory or something else failing.

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #15
I’d recommend TeraCopy (with verify option) for the initial copy and ExactFile for regular verification.


Thanks. I have found ExactFile very, very useful.

Robocopchris, a backup to another physical disc is imperative, in order to prevent losses of data (Natural disasters, user errors, virus, overvoltages...). Fortunately, FLAC encoder adds a MD5 signature to FLAC files. You can test FLAC files to discard corruption, by official FLAC tester FLACTester.exe. However, it can only detect corruption, it can't repair any damaged data (You need QuickPar/Multipar and recovery blocks for that).

Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #16
I have several harddrive backups, a raid 5 8TB for all three computers, a 2 TB only for music files and the music PC internal HDD.

I plan to rip the music and picture files to bluray DL disc, need about 20 for 1TB, and plan using the TDK. Any experience with those as backups?
They should be good for at least 20 - 50 years, and I plan to store in a safe once burned. I don't plan on re ripping and re transferring about a TB worth of flac files...


Move entire HDD content (music) to another

Reply #18
I used TeraCopy twice yesterday to back up to 2 different drives and it worked great.  But, with copy + verify, it was very slow.  Backing up 350 GB, about 37,000 files, took 4 hours to copy then 4 hours to test using USB 3.0.  Then I had to do it to my other drive which ran overnight.  Both times it told me there was an error and both times it was the same file that apparently couldn't be copied over at all.  I don't know why but I just used Windows for that one and it's good having it tell me of problems.

I don't like how it takes over Windows controls by default but it can be turned off so I'm happy.  I recommend it.