Unable to copy selected files to any other drive

Question

Unable to copy selected files to any other drive

iMac, mid-2010, High Sierra. Computer is being retired, need to move data off. Mostly iTunes, music / movies, virtual machine files (Parallels), and other data. File sizes vary - <100MB to >60GB.

Selected files refuse to copy to any media (same drive format, Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Cannot copy these files to another folder on the same drive, a Synology, a Passport external drive, or from Mac to Mac over the network. I have tried using Finder, rsync (via terminal), and FTP to move these files. The files that fail are consistent and they consistently fail at the same amount copied. The files in question are of all sizes (not just large 2GB+ files). The files launch fine and play the movie or song in it's entirety.

Ran disk repair. Nothing wrong. Have run Etrecheck. It doesn't report anything odd.

Posted on Mar 16, 2019 9:16 PM

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Answer 1

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alexwilsonsblog Author

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4 points

Mar 17, 2019 8:43 AM in response to alexwilsonsblog

Self-resolved... more or less. Drive is in pre-fail state. There are hundreds of read errors on the drive. The files affected have sectors that cannot be corrected. Used DriveDX to diagnose the problem.

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Answer 2

Mar 16, 2019 11:17 PM in response to alexwilsonsblog

I'm not sure if your computer has a built in DVD drive or not. If not you can install an external DVD drive and burn it on a DVD disk to save everything you have including text and anything else you want to save. As a retired advertising film photographer computers are machine and sometimes it fails to do its job and with my DVD disk I have all my pictures, text etc. as back up if I needed it. It might take some time to burn everything on the DVD disk, but you will always have copies of everything you saved.

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Answer 3

Mar 17, 2019 6:54 AM in response to Jiro Yoneshige

DVD not an option. Many of the affected files are larger than a DVD can handle and I did try... even the smaller ones can't be written to a DVD. There must be something wrong with these particular files and I am baffled as to what it is.

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