Sammi
February 20th, 2008, 12:01 AM
I just caused my father in law to loose gigabytes of backup files because I made a wrong assumption about Mac OS X behavior.
He has a Macbook and had been moving a large folder and all its content to a external HD, but half way in the transfer got interrupted because of a non-standard letter in a file or folder that the FAT filetable on the external drive couldn't handle. He proceeded to remove the files from the laptop that had been successfully transfered, and called for my help.
He was not sure what the name of the file or folder that was causing troubles was, and I figured that the only way to find out, was to recreate the problem. So I, in my infinite wisdom, started the transfer again by dragging the folder from the desktop to the external HD, and choose "replace" when it asked, just as I've become accustomed to do after years and years of Windows and Ubuntu conditioning.
I don't have much experience with Mac OS X, but just assumed that it would do the same as Windows and Ubuntu do. They only add missing files and overwrite files that are already there, and leave other files alone, but it seems that Mac OS X does things a whole lot differently. It does not keep the files in the folder it overwrites. Nope. I starts out clean, and then copies what supposed to be copied.
The thing is, my father in law had already deleted what he had skillfully managed to backup to his external drive, meaning that it all was lost. Just lost. Because I made a wrong assumption about Mac OS X behavior.
](*,)
He has a Macbook and had been moving a large folder and all its content to a external HD, but half way in the transfer got interrupted because of a non-standard letter in a file or folder that the FAT filetable on the external drive couldn't handle. He proceeded to remove the files from the laptop that had been successfully transfered, and called for my help.
He was not sure what the name of the file or folder that was causing troubles was, and I figured that the only way to find out, was to recreate the problem. So I, in my infinite wisdom, started the transfer again by dragging the folder from the desktop to the external HD, and choose "replace" when it asked, just as I've become accustomed to do after years and years of Windows and Ubuntu conditioning.
I don't have much experience with Mac OS X, but just assumed that it would do the same as Windows and Ubuntu do. They only add missing files and overwrite files that are already there, and leave other files alone, but it seems that Mac OS X does things a whole lot differently. It does not keep the files in the folder it overwrites. Nope. I starts out clean, and then copies what supposed to be copied.
The thing is, my father in law had already deleted what he had skillfully managed to backup to his external drive, meaning that it all was lost. Just lost. Because I made a wrong assumption about Mac OS X behavior.
](*,)