Error copying to mounted WebDAV volume

Are your files perhaps using an encoding that your DAV server doesn't understand? What DAV server are you using?

i am having this exact same problem: i have my www.box.net account mounted as a webDAV server, and while i can copy files out from it onto my mac, whenever i drag something from finder into it, i get the same error message.

If you copy (e.g. with "cp") the same file from the command line (via Terminal) to your WebDAV mount, does that also fail?

hmm, got this partially working: i realized i was using "https" instead of "http" for the box.net URL, in my finder "connect to server..." dialog box.

though i still had trouble moving a few files in particular...

sorry for the dumb question, but, how exactly do i initiate a copy in terminal?

thanks.

sorry for the dumb question, but, how exactly do i initiate a copy in terminal?

There are no dumb questions... 🙂

Launch the Terminal application, which is in your Utilities folder. Once started, you'll see a window with a prompt in it -- this is called a shell prompt. The "shell" (also called the "command line") is what takes your input (in the form of commands) and gives you output. In OS X, many GUI interfaces also have command line equivalents, so most everything you can do in the GUI can also be done from the command line (though less easily, for most people).

Anyway, by default the Terminal will put you in your home folder. At the terminal prompt, you could type "ls" to see a listing of all your files and folders in your home folder. You can use the "mount" command to see all the filesystems that your system has mounted. We need this information because we need to know the path to your WebDAV remote folder. For example, I mounted my .Mac iDisk (which is DAV), and when I type "mount" I see this entry in the output:

http://idisk.mac.com/glsmith/ on /Volumes/glsmith (webdav, nodev, noexec, nosuid, mounted by gls)

This tells me that the folder path /Volumes/glsmith is the root of the WebDAV filesystem. This is important because we need to know where we want to copy data.

Once we know where to copy, we use the "cp" command to do it. Something like this:

cp myfile.txt /Volumes/glsmith/Public

will copy a file named "myfile.txt" to the folder Public on my WebDAV server. If you don't have any files in your home folder that you want to copy, use the "cd" command to move around within Terminal. For example, to go into my Documents folder, I'd do:

cd Documents

If you're so inclined, you can read more about the command line here:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSXTechnology_Overview/CommandLine/chapter_950_section1.html

i appreciate the terminal primer!

the main problem i actually had with my webDAV copy operation was when i attempted to a copy a folder of four files from finder into my box.net account, which failed. however, attempting to a copy the smaller files individually seems to do okay. i'm hesitant to try the 500K file, given how slow the copy operation already is with only a 50K file...

i tried the "cp" command in terminal with the whole folder, but it wouldn't work.

To copy an entire folder and its contents from the command line, the command would be:

cp -R Folder

The -R says "copy the folder and all of its contents, and "Folder" is the name of your folder...

okay, i tried it out: i attempted to copy a folder with four files from finder into my box.net webdav account, and got the following error message:

cp: FRP/RecruitingFRPStudentCalendar08.pdf: could not copy extended attributes to /volumes/dav/FRP/RecruitingFRPStudentCalendar08.pdf: Attribute not found

Ok, so if you ran this command:

ditto --norsrc --noextattr --noacl FRP /Volumes/webdav/

does that work? The "ditto" command is just another copy tool. The specified options allow you to not copy certain special data: --norsrc means don't copy resource forks, --noextattr means don't copy extended attributes and --noacl means don't copy ACLs.

Your DAV server doesn't seem to understand some of this metadata.

Note that in the above command, I just guessed at your folder names -- be sure to use the appropriate target and directory paths...