-
Cloning Storage
Hi guys,
Forgive me if I am posting this inquiry to the wrong forum, if I am could someone simply point me in the right direction.
I have a client who has amassed approx 10TB’s of media over several years. As of now this media resides on 2 x 2TB Lacie drives and 2 x 4TB G-Tech drives – all external, connected via firewire 800.
They have requested we clone their entire archive and send them duplicate drives for them to retain.
So I purchased a 12 TB Mercury Rack Pro from OWC and configured it as a RAID 0 – my plan being to consolidate their archive to single array for easy access of future work. We keep the 12TB array and give the client the 4 external drives.
In my attempt to move all media over from 1 x 4TB G-Tech drive to the Rack Pro I got an error message that halted the transfer.
To make a long story short the Lacies and G-Tech are using the old Apple Partition Map and the new Rack Pro uses GUID Partition Table. So I believe that’s the incompatibility. If I go from APM drive to APM drive I have no issue at all.
I guess my questions are, 1.) is there a way around this? 2.) Is there a better workflow to clone massive amounts of data? 3.) Would Carbon Copy Cloner do the trick?
Any help would be much appreciated, thank you.
Richard Tarantino
-
5 Replies
-
[Richard Tarantino] “So I purchased a 12 TB Mercury Rack Pro from OWC and configured it as a RAID 0 – my plan being to consolidate their archive to single array for easy access of future work. We keep the 12TB array and give the client the 4 external drives.”
You do realize that with RAID 0, when (not if) a single drive in your array fails — even if it just blips and gets dropped from the set — you will lose ALL your data?
[Richard Tarantino] “In my attempt to move all media over from 1 x 4TB G-Tech drive to the Rack Pro I got an error message that halted the transfer.”
What error message did you get? As you’re just copying files from one volume to another, the partition scheme shouldn’t make a difference at all.
[Richard Tarantino] “I guess my questions are, 1.) is there a way around this? 2.) Is there a better workflow to clone massive amounts of data? 3.) Would Carbon Copy Cloner do the trick?”
I personally like ChronoSync for work like this on a Mac. It’s very flexible.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Hey Walter, thanks for the reply.
The error message I get is:
The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “Render Files” can’t be read or written. (Error Code-36)
I tried with other files and folders, even a single wmv file. The error message would re-appear except that instead of saying “Render Files” it would be the name of the folder or file I am trying to transfer over. It does this every time.
Any ideas?
Richard Tarantino
-
This morning, I formatted a brand new GTEK drive to the GPT partition scheme and again pulled some files from the APM drive onto the newly-formatted GTEK drive; they all transferred over successfully. I then tried again to pull from the APM drive directly to the RackPro and this time the files were successfully transferred.
Can anyone tell me what might have occurred, or what could have reset to allow this? Are there any tips for now attempting to pull over an entire hard drive’s files – 2-4TB worth , overnight, not manually, without getting them rejected.
Thanks for any insights you can provide.
Richard Tarantino
-
The GPT/APM difference is a red herring.
Error -36 is one of the most generic error messages the Mac can throw. The historical description of error -36 is “I/O error (bummers).” Unfortunately, that only tells us that the operating system was having trouble reading or writing data. It doesn’t tell us whether the problem was on the read or write side.
As I mentioned before, look at ChronoSync. It’s built for backing up and synchronizing folders. Finder will always abort a copy on an error as above, but you can set ChronoSync to automatically skip files on errors and continue with the copy unattended. It will note skipped files in the error log for you, and you can always run ChronoSync again for a second try at moving only the files that failed the first time around.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Sounds like a great idea Walter – I will give it a try.
Much appreciated.
Richard Tarantino
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up