Question Life gets weird with Western Digital externals

[BarkingGhostar]

Evening All!

I have a pair of Western Digital Elements. They contain exactly the same content on each Elements drive. Both report 1.4TB of free space left. Call them Elements0 and Elements1.
I have a new Western Digital Mybook. The entire 4TB was free space.

I started removing files from the two Elements drives to the Mybook drive. The files were in a specific folder on the Elements and at the start there were about 13,600 RAW image files. I moved about 150 RAW images files at a time and when I had moved approximately 3,000 of those files and something strange happened.

Elements0 reports the file count in the folder I was removing files from as going from 13,600 to 28, but the Elements1 went from 13,600 to 10,150. The Myboox reports 3,450 files added. All other folders on the two Elements drives have the exact file counts. Mind you Elements0 is an exact clone of Elements1.

How can the Elements0 drive report +10,000 less all of a sudden while the actual disk reports the same amount of consumed storage capacity? Starting to think a platter has died or something.

FYI the RAW image files are from my Canon 5Ds, which is a 50MP camera. I also opened Terminal on both Elements and searched to see if somehow a hidden flag had gotten applied but nope. 10K files disappeared but they continue to consume disk space.

 

[In2Photos]

I had something similar happen a few years ago, also with RAW files (CR2 files from Canon Rebel XT, 30D, 40D and 1DMKII). Ever since that time I no longer move files, I copy them. I was able to use some software to recover most of the files, but not the original file names. I had to manually open each file with a RAW file viewer and cross reference it with the thumbnail image in my Lightroom Library to determine the original filename. Hopefully you have a backup of these files or something else is going on, because this consumed many hours of my life.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, never use Move in Explorer for groups for files, it has a tendency to screw up and lose data.

 

[manly]

Terminal? MacOS? I'd use rsync -a.

Windows has a few third-party options:

XCopy considered harmful - Robocopy or XXCopy or SyncBack

It's just so darn hard to copy a lot of files these days. If it's more than ...

www.hanselman.com

If you need something repeatable (like juggling external HDDs as periodic backups), I'd recommend using the free SyncBack instead of rolling your own inadequate solution.

 

[Seba]

It's just so darn hard to copy a lot of files these days. If it's more than 1000 files or larger than a gig, I don't even try with Explorer anymore. It's not worth the angst.

That article is from 2007.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Windows 10 and maybe 11 is better with file copying and haven't had any issues copying files at work (other than one or maybe two instances of some kind of bitrot in Win11 but then the SSD was Samsung 870 so who knows?). But I would still be wary of doing anything too extensive in Win11. You never know when your luck may run out with whatever update they applied to use you as their willing guinea pig.

 

[dlerious]

I've been using cut and paste instead of move when I put files in a new location. If it's something important, I'll do a copy and compare to make sure they're the same before deleting the original. If I'm doing a whole drive or most of one, I'll clone the drive.