Error when moving files

Help & Support
21

So, so far, all we know is there is sometimes an error when copying large amounts of data between two of your harddrives. There's nothing to suggest it isn't a legitimate error coming from the operating system, caused by a problem that that would affect the same copy if it was done using Explorer instead of Opus.

New drives fail all the time so a drive being new doesn't mean there's no chance of it having bad sectors or problems reading/writing when hot, and so on. Leaving a full chkdsk surface scan to run over night seems like a good idea to me. That will make sure the disks are okay and your data is safe, and means we can rule that possibility out if no problem is found.

Another fairly common cause of data corruption when reading/writing a lot of data, and particularly when also drawing to the screen (or playing sound or, basically, accessing other things on the PCI/AGP bus) like Opus's progress dialog does, is IDE/motherboard driver and firmware bugs. This has affected just about every manufacturer over the years and still crops up in recent hardware. It usually gets fixed once the manufacturers notice, but if your IDE/motherboard drivers/firmware are not up-to-date then it's definitely worth installing the updates. I've personally seen problems like this with VIA, NVidia and Intel chipsets, all of which got fixed by later firmware and/or driver updates. That includes my current PC whose model of motherboard, that was only released about a year ago, initially had data corruption issues until an updated firmware came out

It's up to you, of course. It's your data and time. So far though, and not speaking on behalf of GPSoftware (who I don't work for or represent), I don't see anything to investigate in Opus. I've copied hundreds of gigs of data (at a time) between various types of HDD on many occasions using Opus without any problems. It seems like you're seeing error messages and assuming the problem is the program reporting the errors, with no investigating into the cause of them or whether they are due to a real problem. Maybe there is a bug in Opus that causes error messages about corrupt files/folders if you copy a lot of data, but this is the first time anyone has reported it, we don't have much to go on to investigate or try to reproduce it it, and there seem to be a lot of other things to look into on your computer that are more likely to be the cause of the problem. If there is a data corruption problem is best found sooner than later.

22

A move between drives is just a copy followed by a delete, so whether the error occurs on a move or a copy isn't significant.

23

Thanks for your elaborate feedback. I ran chkdsk on both the RAID and the external drive, but no errors were found (luckely).

Again, I wud like to emphasize that in my case DO never produced any errors when moving / copying upto a few GB,
but the error pops up when larger amounts are moved/copied.
Q: why is it that it happened only in case volumes are 25-27+ GB

It reports a folder to be corrupt, but when the folder is copied a 2nd time,
no problem. Q: why not?

Q: why is it that in the 3rd session, copying abt 26GB - included the 'corrupted' folders/files - everything went fine?

You see, questions - questions. I do understand that the problems are vague, i.e. there is hardly anything to go on :cry:
I guess right now there is simply no alternative but to accept this peculiar error.

As a kind of workaround I am right now copying files using cmd-prompt xxcopy.

See happens.

Apart from that, DO is a wonderful piece of software!

Thanks again for your reply.

24

Used XXCopy when copying 144GB to the external drive.

==

Directories processed = 93 Total data in bytes = 144.863.393.792 Elapsed time in sec. = 23.320 Action speed (MB/min) = g Files copied = 569 Directories created = 91 Exit code = 0 (No error, Successful operation)

No problems.
Obviously using xxcopy works fine as long as it involves 1 folder only (the above was 1 folder plus a number of subfolders).

brgds

25

[quote="mrwul"]Q: why is it that it happened only in case volumes are 25-27+ GB

It reports a folder to be corrupt, but when the folder is copied a 2nd time,
no problem. Q: why not?

Q: why is it that in the 3rd session, copying abt 26GB - included the 'corrupted' folders/files - everything went fine?[/quote]

There are lots of possible reasons for intermittent read/write errors with drives. If there is a small physical defect, or problems with the drive expanding when it becomes hot after a lot sustained activity, then the problem may go away on a retry or subsequent attempt.

The same is true of driver/firmware issues that cause data corruptions in my experience. The types of bugs there usually have to do with unfortunate timing of events when the system is busy, e.g. if piece of hardware takes slightly longer than usual to respond, perhaps because some other hardware is using the bus at the same time, and occsionally things happen in a way that triggers a rare (but dangerous!) bug.

Those sorts of bugs are more likely to occur in the drivers/firmware than at the application level (i.e. Opus), at least in the case of a file copy where there's only really one thread doing any work (on the copy itself). That combined with there not being any other reports (as far as I know) of this error happening while copying make me doubt it is Opus, although it is always a possibility, like everything else, until the cause is found.

Another thought: After doing a copy (with Opus or XXCopy or anything else) it might be worth running a tool which compares the data, or MD5 checksums, of the original and the copy. That'll double-check that none of the file contents were changed by the copy.

Another thing that might be causing errors is real-time anti-virus checking, I suppose. Seems like a strange error message to get as a result of that, though.

I did a search on the error message yesterday and there are lots of hits but none of them seemed to be relevant to me. :frowning:

26

Nevertheless above problem doesn't describe the "null" error which definetely occurs on write protected files without any known reason.

27

I did another xxcopy (about 30GB) - no problem. Obviously this is a really inefficient way of working (need to create a batchfile
to xxcopy all the different folders).

Maybe it has something to do with the sequence of copying: xxcopy is copying one folder after the other, whereas in DO one
may select a number of folders using DO and then copy them.

Maybe DO is trying to copy as many as possible simulteanously and a conflict can occurr when DO has to wait whilst
copying 1GB files and whilst doing so in the meantime attempts to fetch the next files ?
I admit - it truely is a long shot though... :wink:

Remember, it only happens (to me only, I know) when moving/copying large files/volumes.

Well anyway ... I may need to find another of workaround - rather than using xxcopy.

thanks for all yr comments.