An educated egg-dicator (for computers)

January 21, 2008 8:01 AM

Mac OS X: External drive is dying, many corrupt files randomly strewn about it. What Mac utility can copy all the non-corrupt files to a new disk and provide a list of the files it couldn't copy?

Copying certain files gives an error -36. These files do not open in any application. Disk Utility says everything's just fine. It's lying. It's also unable to image the disk. DiskWarrior is no help either.

I'm imagining something that would crawl through the disk file by file, copying what it can and making a note of what it can't.

I've got a somewhat recent backup, so I'm not really freaking out, but I'd like to keep the most recent files possible. Thanks much, hive mind.

posted by Plug Dub In to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Have you tried Super Duper!? I have had nothing but success with it. Caveat is that it will not support Leopard until v2.5, due out any day now (but not yet, apparently).
posted by Admiral Haddock at 8:16 AM on January 21

A quick and dirty way would be to use rsync and pipe the output to a file, then just grep for error messages.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 8:16 AM on January 21

you could try cp, rsync or psync (not built-in), there are graphical front-ends to these for osx (rsyncx and psyncx, respectively) using cp on the commandline you'd just want to do something like cp -rp /Volumes/yourdrive /Volumes/otherdrive and I think it would print out any non-copyable files... not sure if corrupt files would cause it to choke though...
posted by JRGould at 8:17 AM on January 21

rsync -av /source /destination > rsync.log
(I always do a test run on a known bad file because I ALWAYS forget what the rsync error msg is.)
Then
grep -i errormessage rsync.log
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 8:19 AM on January 21 [1 favorite]

Data Rescue II has worked for me in the past, though I'd recommend doing the rsync test first.
posted by holgate at 8:25 AM on January 21

That rsync bit is exactly what I wanted. Thank you!

Data Rescue looks like it might help recover some of the damaged files. I'll have to poke at it a bit harder to see what it's doing, but copying an un-openable Photoshop file with it resulted in an openable (but slightly damaged) file, so that might be pretty cool.

Thanks everybody.
posted by Plug Dub In at 8:59 AM on January 21