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.
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.
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