macOS Hard Drive Data Transfer APFS HFS+ – Copying 84GB File via USB Results in Duplicate File Warning

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I'm attempting to copy an 84 Gigabyte photo library from an external Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+ disk to a newly formatted case-insensitive APFS SSD. The external disk is in an external drive bay connected via USB.

The operation takes a few hours, at which point I'm greeted with the error message

You can’t copy this file because its name is the same as other items on the destination volume, and that volume doesn’t distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames.

There is no duplicate file on the drive.

Is the file name being cached somehow because of the file size? Is it something in the package contents? The file integrity is fine – I can open it as a photos library from the bay. I thought I could open it as a referenced file and use the Photo's Consolidate option to simply get around the issue, but "Show referenced file" and "consolidate" are both greyed out in the file menu.

Can I use rsync or some other method to copy the file or are there actual case-sensitivity issues in there I need to address? It's my wife's entire photo collection, so I'm proceeding with extreme caution, and would greatly appreciate guidance.

Best Answer

OP's solution:

in the end opened up my FTP client and transferred the file via my local ethernet. It worked!

I would highly recommend that you perform a total system backup using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Carbon Copy Cloner does support restoring to a case-insensitive system from a case-sensitive one - see this.

https://superuser.com/a/380358/1038202
SuperDuper is the best way to clone drives in OS X. You can rename the destination drive in Finder

https://superuser.com/a/20779/1038202
There's also a script on Github, which claims to
- Resolve all case-sensitivity naming conflicts
- Make a fresh TimeMachine backup
- Flip the backups's case-sensitivity flag
- Restore from the manipulated backup
https://github.com/cr/MacCaseSensitiveConversion

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MacOS – Mountain Lion 10.8.3 file sharing broken for particular named folder

I'm not sure what to tell you about the actual problem but I can share some insight that might help you track it down. The iMac connecting to the lower case "flac" share but mounting it as "flac-1" tells me it's all ready connected to a volume named some form of flac. It could just be that it's all ready connected to the SMB NAS you mentioned.

Regardless I've seen an issue where software expects a certain path and instead of throwing an error about not finding the path it just tried to create it which then leaves a sort of null path that you have to manually remove. If you don't remove it then names like "flac-1" start appearing. Re-reading that it may not make sense but regardless the steps I've used to see what's what are firing up Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities) and typing:

ls -la /Volumes

If you see more listed here than you expect or can find through normal finder navigation then you can remove them (Only do this if you're 100% sure it's a path that contains nothing you ever want to see again!) by typing:

rm -rf /Volumes/NULLPATH

where NULLPATH is what you wan to get rid of.

Along these lines if the mini is all ready showing a "FLAC" or some such in /Volumes then you're not goign to be able to share a folder by the same name. As in if the mini is connected to the SMB NAS then you're going to have to use a different share name.

Also you can turn ownership on, on your external HD by opening the get info window on the drive and checking the box at the bottom of the window to "Enable Ownership on this volume". I'm not sue it will in any way effect your issue but might be something to try.

Check Copied Files – How to Check Which Files Have Been Copied to Main Hard Drive

Using a bit of Bash and some nice utilities is possible to compare MD5 of every single file. I will assume here that the same MD5 means the same content.

Make MD5 of everything:

find /one/dir -type f | xargs md5 > one.txt
find /other/dir -type f | xargs md5 > other.txt

Compare every MD5 in order to find what is missing where:

diff -u <(cut -d'=' -f2 one.txt | sort) <(cut -d'=' -f2 other.txt | sort) > diff.txt

Only found in /one/dir:

grep -f <(sed -n 's/^- //p' diff.txt) one.txt

Only found in /other/dir:

grep -f <(sed -n 's/^+ //p' diff.txt) other.txt

Let me know if this works.

Best Answer

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