I just downloaded FFS onto my 2016 Macbook Pro (running macOS Monterey) today because I have two external drives (let's call them DriveA [source drive] & DriveB [destination drive]) that I want to sync together so that they both have exactly the same files on them. Pretty much all the files are either .jpg, .psd, or .cr2 files.
DriveA has all of my files (approx. 2TB) that I wanted copied onto DriveB, so last night I was doing this manually. Everything is located in one single folder (let's call it the Target Folder) on DriveA, so I just dragged that folder onto DriveB and it began copying the files. Everything was going smoothly and it gave me an estimated time of "about a day..." so I let it sit overnight and figured all the files would be copied over to DriveB by this morning. However, upon waking up this morning, I encounter error code -36 which states: "The Finder can't complete the operation because some data in "Target Folder" can't be read or written". After this, I checked to see what files had successfully transferred over, and it seemed as though about half of them did, but there are SO many files that needed to be copied that I can't tell exactly which files didn't end up getting copied to DriveB. This is what led me to download FFS, because of the ability to compare two drives.
So, I downloaded FFS for macOS this morning. I was able to successfully compare the volumes at first, and it did give me the info I was looking for (which files didn't get transferred). I figured it would be easier to use FFS's "synchronization" feature instead of manually copying them, like what I was doing last night. I wanted to test it out on a small folder within the Target Folder first before attempting to sync the entirety of the Target Folder from DriveA to DriveB in case something went wrong. Well, I am glad I did because several things are going wrong now.
I was able to pinpoint the exact location where the Target Folder stopped copying originally from my manual copy method, so I went into that folder (let's call it Test Folder). In the Test Folder, there were 1,058 images on DriveA and 1,051 images on DriveB, meaning that specific folder was only missing 7 files. So, I decided to use the FFS sync feature to sync these 7 files from DriveA to DriveB. When I started the sync, it gave me an estimated transfer time of like 10 hours (Why? I don't know). I let it sit and think for about 10 min, but it didn't do anything at all and the estimated time just kept increasing, so I decided to cancel the sync job. When I did this, this is really when it messed things up.
On my computer, I went back into DriveA and DriveB and saw both drives had "sync.ffs_lock" files in them, along with some ".tmp" files on DriveB. On DriveB, the 7 files I was attempting to sync from DriveA were visible, but greyed out with a little "x" in the top corner. It took me awhile, but I was able to remove these files from both drives. However, after that, I was still having issues, and after reading through probably a hundred other of these forums, I could only find ONE where someone else was having a similar issue, but that OP never got a response to his question. He did update his post later on mentioning that his son was able to figure out that the permissions of the drive were affected when a sync job was cancelled, but he was able to fix the permissions.
What I have gathered from what I've read is that when you cancel a compare/sync job in the middle of the job, it leaves these "lock" files at the source and destination. I understand the reason for locking the directories during sync, and I did see the FFS expert settings info about how to turn this off, but I have been unable to find out how to do that on my Mac, as I cannot find the "GlobalSettings.xmp" FFS file in my Library. Also, after cancelling the sync of the 7 files from the Test Folder, both of my drives' read/write permissions were altered somehow, making it so I could only "read" to the drives, but not "write" to them.
Like I said before, I was able to delete the lock files, and eventually I was able to figure out how to change the permissions back to allow me to both read AND write to the drives. So, I am basically back where I started. I uninstalled and reinstalled FFS and attempted to use FFS again to compare the Target Folder in the two drives, but when I start the compare, it just freezes up my entire computer and crashes the program. I decided to go back to doing it the old-fashioned, manual way (dragging & dropping), but once again, I don't know which files have been successfully copied to DriveB and which ones haven't. Those 7 files I attempted to sync earlier are now corrupt. Every time I attempt to copy & paste or drag & drop them from DriveA to DriveB, it just sits there and says it's preparing to copy, but it never does, and eventually it goes to the spinning beach ball of death, and I have to completely restart my computer. I also cannot even delete them from DriveA. When I attempt to, it gives me this error:
- Error.png (75.37 KiB) Viewed 843 times
At this point, I was so frustrated with FFS that I just ended up completely uninstalling it from my computer because it was useless to me, not being able to run either a compare or a sync job since it just freezes up. Also, I figured maybe uninstalling the program would fix the issues entirely, and mostly it has, but the 7 files are still corrupt (which isn't an issue, I have them backed-up to a third location), but I am just confused what is going wrong. Am I doing something wrong? I would really, really appreciate any sort of help from anybody who thinks they could possibly help me!
Thank you all in advance.
