As I posted on the KDE forum yesterday, I’m having a serious issue with copying large files and folders in SUSE. I have a gallery consisting of images and videos in subfolders, where some contain more than 40.000 images. I back them up to an external drive, by choosing “write into” and “skip existing files” to only update what’s been changed. Both the source partition and external drive are NTFS. The result is that Dolphin fails to copy the contents of subfolders properly, and even worse to see the correct size and file count. Whenever I refresh a directory’s properties, it shows a random size and file count (once it’s 30GB, then it’s 7GB, then it’s 15GB and so on).
I need a way to copy those folders without the risk of data loss. If it’s a Dolphin problem, is there any way to fix it? If not, is there any other file manager distributed with openSUSE that is known to copy huge folders without any problems? I don’t know if this due to the partitions being NTFS, but because of to involvement I still have with Windows they need to stay such and I can’t convert them to ext4.
No, I’m not trying to use Linux as Windows. I simply need to copy files and folders across two drives, which is a natural Linux act. Only Windows thing is that the partitions are NTFS because I need them to be this format. And even if I could convert all my drives to ext4: Considering another person who uses Windows comes to me with an external drive (formatted as NTFS) and asks me to copy them something, I need to be able to do that. I can’t tell them “Sorry, your drive is NTFS and I use Linux, operating system business”. Especially since openSUSE is able to work with this file system natively… would have made sense if NTFS was patented or copyrighted.
openSUSE has it’s own reader for NTFS, which is what might cause the problem to happen. If so I might need to find a drastic solution, even if I’m not sure what (booting in Windows or making a Windows VM just to copy files is silly). But it’s possible that other applications might handle copying differently… so again, if someone knows one, please poke me about it.
It is not really a fancy gui program (has a text based gui) but you
could try midnight commander (you have to run it in a terminal).
su -c "zypper in mc"
you run it then with mc in a terminal (on kde in konsole or xterm).
If that works well it was a kde problem, if that also does not work well
there is a deeper problem.
–
PC: oS 12.2 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.8.4 | GeForce GT 420
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.2 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.9.1 | HD 3000
eCAFE 800: oS 12.2 i586 | AMD Geode LX 800@500MHz | 512MB | KDE 3.5.10
Thanks. I installed MC because it reminds me of when I was a kid and DOS + Norton Commander & Windows 3.11 were my main systems If all else fails I will try it for copying my files.
I remember about the cp console command, and that sounds like a good alternative too (especially since I can make a shell script to automatically update my files that way). The “u” parameter is even better… I imagine the rest make sure matching subfolders are also written into from source to destination. Will try this first next time I backup… today I went back to Windows to copy my files.
Yes, “r” is recursive. “v” is verbose, not necessary but I like to see the progress and any other messages. For more info, see ‘cp --help’ for a list of options and brief descriptions, or ‘man cp’ for more detailed info.
Not sure if this will solve your problem but I use Luckybackup which is a gui app and has a super user mode which seems necessary when dealing with NTFS. I haven’t tried NTFS backup with this but there is a check box to enable it in the settings. It also provides incremental backups and will email you the log after backups are finished. So I think worth a try for you. By the way you need to enable kde3 repossitary to download it.
When you mount these NTFS partitions, are you putting this in your /etc/fstab file or just plugging in a USB drive and using an auto mount? For NTFS partitions mounted using the /etc/fstab file, I normally change the options line to read only defaults, thus allowing any user to read and write to those NTFS partitions. I did not see how these are being mounted stated.
I plug the drive in USB and it automatically mounts and appears in the drives list (notifier pops up and asks what to open with). Haven’t added it manually to /etc/fstab and I don’t wanna touch too many things there, so it’s just auto-mounted.
On 2012-09-27 21:36, MirceaKitsune wrote:
>
> Thanks. I installed MC because it reminds me of when I was a kid and DOS
> + Norton Commander & Windows 3.11 were my main systems If all else
> fails I will try it for copying my files.
Absolutely, it is the best filebrowser there is in Linux, and it is intentionally similar to
the Norton Commander. Did you ever use “xtree” in Windows 3? There is a partial look alike in
Linux, too
Yes, ‘mc’ should be able to do the job, it is what I use, although it also has its quirks (and
bugs). If it works where dolphin fails, it is a bug of kde, regardless of the partition being
ntfs, that’s irrelevant.
Another tool I use for this kind of job is rsync:
rsync --archive --acls --xattrs --hard-links --del --stats --human-readable SOURCE/ DEST
Careful with “–del” above: it can delete the entire DEST if it exists and doesn’t match
SOURCE. It happened to me when testing a backup, I destroyed a root partition.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
An update on this: I added more to my gallery so I decided to back it up again today. I used the cp command suggested here, and it worked very nicely and copied every file in each sub-folder, skipping existing files. However it would not persist file properties such as Date Modified, as for that you need the -p parameter. So for consistency, the best command for what I’m doing is:
If all else fails I will try it for copying my files.