Moving files between HDD drives hangs in one file

I have two NTFS hard drives of the same size, one is full and the other empty. The full hard drive has some files that I can’t access or delete. So I decided to move all files to the empty hard drive and format the one that was full. But while moving the files with nemo it hangs on a specific file and doesn’t continue.

I want to know a way of skipping problematic files.

Since it doesn’t tell me the name of the file, but only a number of files being transferred I can’t skip that file by restarting the process without that file.

You could use a tool like rsync to copy the files. It has an option to show which file it’s currently copying. If you see it hanging, simply intrrrupt it, add the problematic file to the exclusion list and run rsync again.

I’d prefer not to to read a three thousand lines man page to use a tool once.

Bad idea with NTFS partitions.

Maybe FreeFileSync is a tool you need here:

pamac build freefilesync

I have no idea how to skip files in nemo.

Failure to read (part of) a file might come from drive block corruption. You might want to check your drive health.


Following @megavolt comment about NTFS, do keep in mind that NTFS support is definitely not as good as on Windows, since it comes from retro-engineering. You should prefer filesystems with better Linux support, such as ext4, btrfs, or exFAT (if you intend to share files with Windows), moreover for so many files you may fill the drive.


understandable but not a commendable approach …

search the man page for keywords like “-v” or “–verbose” or “progress”
(CTRL + / is the key combination to start a search when you called the man page with
man rsync
or
man cp)

rsync -av source destination
or
rsync -av --progress source destination
should work
as well as the good old cp (copy) comand
cp -av source destination

You’ll see where it gets stuck.

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