How to skip bad files during batch copy.

[Neal UJ]

I have a 500gb USB drive. It has all my photos on it. I want to copy the lot
to a new PC. Some of the files are corrupt. During a copy, I get an error
message about a particular file, click OK and the whole process halts.

I have about 11,000 photos, and I guess froma small survey about 2% of them
are broken.

I need a way of batch copying that will auto-skip bad files, then give me a
list so that I can go back later and try to recover them - in the meantime
10,800 photos will be saved (literally). I tried a couple af free
file-management downloads, but they seem to just use the standard xp process,
and halt in exactly the same way.

Best
Neal

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

I have a 500gb USB drive. It has all my photos on it. I want to copy the
lot
to a new PC. Some of the files are corrupt. During a copy, I get an error
message about a particular file, click OK and the whole process halts.

I have about 11,000 photos, and I guess froma small survey about 2% of
them
are broken.

I need a way of batch copying that will auto-skip bad files, then give me
a
list so that I can go back later and try to recover them - in the meantime
10,800 photos will be saved (literally). I tried a couple af free
file-management downloads, but they seem to just use the standard xp
process,
and halt in exactly the same way.

Best
Neal

Use robocopy.exe. It has switches for time out and number of retries and it
can log the whole process.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en

Note also that "broken" can mean different things. If the file is corrupted
then the copy process will copy it happily but your picture viewer won't
open it. If you have bad disk clusters then some copy programs will stall
but robocopy will proceed if you use the right switches. However, a disk
with bad clusters is bad news. Best to replace it immediately.

 

[Neal UJ]

Use robocopy.exe. It has switches for time out and number of retries and it
can log the whole process.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en

Note also that "broken" can mean different things. If the file is corrupted
then the copy process will copy it happily but your picture viewer won't
open it. If you have bad disk clusters then some copy programs will stall
but robocopy will proceed if you use the right switches. However, a disk
with bad clusters is bad news. Best to replace it immediately.

.

Looks good, have DLed, will try tomorrow.
The "bad" photos wont even copy from the HDD, the ones that do open OK.
I've found a good utility to try then to recover bad files (photorec.exe)

Thaks for the swift help.
Neal

 

[Paul]

Looks good, have DLed, will try tomorrow.
The "bad" photos wont even copy from the HDD, the ones that do open OK.
I've found a good utility to try then to recover bad files (photorec.exe)

Thaks for the swift help.
Neal

You can never have too many spare disks around, when disaster hits...

One thing to try, is to do a surface scan first, and see if there
are bad sectors. For example, HDTune can read the entire surface of
the disk. The graphic it produces, colors squares on the screen according
to whether bad sectors are being detected. The reason for wanting to know
about bad sectors, is to understand whether chkdsk is feasible or not.

(Version 2.55 is free.)
http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

HDTune also has SMART statistics (under the "Health" tab). The "Current Pending"
count would be a count of suspicious sectors, ones that will be evaluated
on the next write operation.

If the disk is damaged, you can try copying it with procedures described here.
A program like "dd_rescue" can copy a disk, and ignore sectors which won't
read properly. Other utilities may choose to stop, if they hit a fatal error.
The advantage of making the copy is, all the sectors on the new disk used,
would be OK, so if you attempted to use chkdsk, anything it tries will at
least have a good place to store the results.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

Once you had a backup copy of the disk, you could copy that to another disk.
And then run chkdsk on the copy. Perhaps chkdsk could make more of the damaged
files available to you. (Or perhaps not. That is why you work on a copy
of the data.) Chkdsk normally accepts a drive letter, but
there is also an option to give a volume name to it instead.

(See "symbolic link name" here.)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457122.aspx

In addition to Photorec, you can also try this program. When using
a scavenger program, you guessed it, you'll need another disk to provide
space for all the recovered files.

(This utility was initially free. The author sold the program and removed
the download. This is an archived copy.)

http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/WoundedMoon/win32/driverescue19d.html

Paul

 

[Twayne]

In

I have a 500gb USB drive. It has all my photos on it. I want to copy
the lot to a new PC. Some of the files are corrupt. During a copy, I
get an error message about a particular file, click OK and the whole
process halts.

I have about 11,000 photos, and I guess froma small survey about 2%
of them are broken.

I need a way of batch copying that will auto-skip bad files, then
give me a list so that I can go back later and try to recover them -
in the meantime 10,800 photos will be saved (literally). I tried a
couple af free file-management downloads, but they seem to just use
the standard xp process, and halt in exactly the same way.

Best
Neal

If you're confident enough to drop down to the Command Line level, xcopy is
probably the best and quickest way to go. Type xcopy /? to see all the
switches available. Windows Copy can definitely be annoying like that!

Twayne

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

I run into the problem in copying (backing up) the -Favorites- file. IE
will save a URL with whatever name comes up as a default, regardless of
it's size. But -Copy- won't copy a URL name longer than some unspecified
number. When it encounters a long name, -Copy- gives the error message
and dies.

Any of the suggestions above good for copying the Favorites?

Thanks

The maximum path + file name is well specified - it is 260 characters. You
need to rename your excessively long file names to drop below this limit.