Resume interrupted file transfer to harddrive

Question

I was copying my whole user folder over to a harddrive for backup, but I had to plug out the disk because I had to leave. I got about 160 of 220gigs transferred, and now the file is sitting on the drive like this:

with the neaty little progress bar.

Which leads me into thinking, there must be a way to keep going from where I left off?

Do i just have to copy-paste the file again and hope osx magically does it for me, or do I have to do any commandline-fu to get this working?

Solution 1

I've just done a couple of quick tests with OS X Mavericks and it seems that the answer to your question depends on where the copy was at when you interrupted it.

If a sub-folder with multiple files was being copied when you stopped it then just that sub folder will not be accurately copied if you just recopy everything as you did the first time.

Everything else will be. Once fully copied you will have to open the folder which was "part way" through and re-copy it.

If you interrupted the copy when a file was being copied (rather than a folder) then there is nothing special you need to do, a re-copy will work fine.

You will need to click through the usual "Don't replace" and "Apply to all" dialog boxes for all the above scenarios:

Solution 2

Appreciate this is late, but this is still a problem in Mid 2021.

I am trying to recover 2TB of data from a Late 2012 iMac i7 with a 3.12TB Fusion drive where the HDD is failing (>10,000 Uncorrectable Errors). Amongst them precious photos and videos the user doesn't have a backup of.

The easy answer for me, coming mostly from the Windows world was to use DOpus, a powerful file manager for Windows that lets you carry out copy/move operations as "Unattended" operations with various options on what to do if any files already exist. It also has options to Ignore errors.

What's even better is you can just start the copy, set the options and walk away and it will even log each error, along with the reason, in a list that can be easily exported. You can download a fully functional 60-day evaluation copy at GPSoftware - DOpus.

DOpus has it's roots in the Amiga era and is still actively developed and supported today. My only affiliation is that I'm a long standing very satisfied loyal customer who uses DOpus in my role as an independent IT Tech to recover data from dying hard drives very often. I'd be totally lost without it.

I booted the Mac from a USB attached SSD I had High Sierra on, turned on SMB file sharing and set the options to share the afflicted user's home directory. Simply connected to the folder over the network from the Windows machine and initiated the copy. As I write this, 609GB of the 2TB has already been copied and I'm about to go to bed leaving the copy running.

Comments

[Admin]

Your answer, while neat, doesn't respond to his question. His question is "Is there a way to get OS X to pick up where it left off" and the answer as far as I know is NO. There are other programs that can resume transfers more cleanly (like Transit), but they aren't usually used for local copying. These are usually used for network transfers. Sorry I have no happy method for you to use...