Moving 20,000 JPEG files from a USB drive onto a Mac…without it crashing

December 1, 2024 2:22 PM

I’m trying to transfer 20,000 old family photos onto my parents’ M1 iMac. Should be easy enough - just drag and drop, right? The problem is when I try to do so, the Mac pinwheels and the drive “ejects”. Any tips to make the process easier?
posted by Seeking Direction to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Have you tried doing 1000 at a time?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:39 PM on December 1, 2024

Can you transfer 1, 10, 100 at time? If none of those work, there's a different problem than number of, or aggregate size of a transfer. If those do work, and assuming you've chosen an appropriate destination for the files and have sufficient space on the M1, I'd suggest trying perhaps 1/10 of them at once. I pulled that fraction out of the air; you might get away with more, you may need to try fewer.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 2:41 PM on December 1, 2024

Try running the command in the terminal.

Something like:

cp -r -v {path to files} {path to thumb drive}

To get the two paths, drag and drop the folders into the terminal window. It will type out the path for you. Not sure if they will be properly quoted or not - if there are spaces in the path, you may need to enclose it in quotes. Single or double would be fine.

This may just work, or give you more details to go on if it fails.
posted by Number Used Once at 3:09 PM on December 1, 2024 [1 favorite]

(If you drag a path into Terminal, it will automatically escape any spaces or special characters. Note that single and double quotes do have different meanings if you have certain special characters in your file or folder names, so if you're not familiar with escaping characters in Bash or Zsh [depending on your OS version], just let Terminal do it when you drag the path in.)
posted by tubedogg at 3:34 PM on December 1, 2024

If the drive is ejecting, I'd be nervous the drive was failing. Are there other copies of these pictures?

All my good solutions here would be command line based, like the suggestions from Number Used Once though, I might use rsync with the rate limiter. This'll take a long time, but if the drive's controller is overheating or something might keep it from overheating:

rsync --bwlimit=1000 /path/to/source /path/to/dest/

If that doesn't work you could try using ddrescue if the disk seems to mostly work or Photorec if it doesn't.
posted by gregr at 4:15 PM on December 1, 2024 [5 favorites]

Does the drive on your parents' iMac have enough space to hold the files you're trying to transfer?
posted by TimHare at 8:39 PM on December 1, 2024

Yeah, Finder is busy enumerating all 20,000 files and doing a bad job of it and eventually running out of memory. In addition to the rsync options above, there's also the following couple of commercial GUI options:

Get Backup Pro 3 which does rsync, but graphically. It's really sort of designed as a way to automatically sync stuff off to another drive whenever you plug it in, but it works well enough for one off tasks.

Panic's Transmit, which has a synchronization feature that ought to finish before the free trial expires.
posted by Kyol at 6:47 AM on December 2, 2024

I use the cross-platform and open-source graphical program FreeFileSync for this kind of task weekly. I like how it clearly previews which files need to be moved, and can build on partial transfers by identifying files that are missing or corrupted (not the same as the source) and only copy those required files.
posted by QuixoticGambit at 12:30 PM on December 5, 2024