Copying Files to External Hard Drive via Terminal?

So I stopped the back up before it was complete. How can I recover files from my external hard drive? My external Hard drive is 2tb why would the files get erased if it has more room than my Mac book hard drive?

John,

If the OP has the DiskWarrior 5 USB stick, it can be inserted into the Mac prior to booting into Recovery. Once Terminal is launched in Recovery, one can then run DiskWarrior directly by the following command string, or change directory to that DiskWarrior binary:

/Volumes/DW/Installer\ Items/DiskWarrior.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskWarrior &

This will launch DiskWarrior 5 GUI, and one is good to go. For the OP drive circumstance, I would be inclined to press the Option key which will allow Rebuild... and Scavenge.

I have done this myself, so I know it works.

Yes.

You may be able to use the cp or ditto commands to copy the files off; run ‘man cp’ or ‘man ditto’ for information about using them.

(122377)

If you can see the partition, you can use Disk Utility/Restore to copy the data to an external. Note it reformats the external, so any data on it will be lost.

Click here and here for the pages.

(122397)

You can in theory boot to a Recovery partition or the Internet Recovery software, from that you can then in theory use Terminal to copy files to an external drive. Roughly the command would be

ditto /path/to/source /Volumes/path/to/destination

As a tip if you are copying a folder and you want ditto to make the same folder on the destination you need to include the folder name in the destination path, e.g.

ditto /Users/myuser/Documents/myfolder /Volumes/Backup/myfolder

Before however you get stuck in to trying the above you might want to consider trying DiskWarrior. I don't believe it will necessarily be able to repair the damage any better than Disk Utility aka. fsck because it sounds like the hard disk has developed a hardware problem, but Disk Warrior can sometimes 'mount' a virtual copy of the hard disk and let you copy files from this virtual copy. I have myself managed to recover the vast majority of a hard disk this way.

To do this you would need to boot from a different drive, install Disk Warrior on it, run it to try and access the failing drive and then you should be able to try using the Finder to copy files from the virtual copy of the drive.

I used my Mac external hard drive with data on it to try to backup my Mac book in recovery mode. Will I lose all my data from the external hard drive? Does it really get reformatted?