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10.27.2011

Still finding the best file copying workflow for my home network

File copying in a reliable fashion is such a dark art.  You thought you can rely on Windows to let me know whether files are successfully copied from one drive to another drive, but when removable medias like thumb drive, USB or eSATA harddisk comes into picture, the answer becomes not as certain as you would like it to be.

So this morning I was trying to copying stuff from my laptop (DELL M6500 running Windows 7 Ultimate) to another machine on my home network (DELL Dimension 9500 running Windows 7 Ultimate).  KNowing that for some odd reason that after large amount of file copying, the MacMini running OSX would stopped recognizing my home server 9500, I tried to think of a way to copy files without using network copy.  So instead I first copied files to my external eSATA harddisk using the eSATA port, and then connect the harddisk to my home server 9500 with USB 2.0, and did the copying.

At least I thought everything went well.  But when I tried to play the video I copied, I realized that the file wasn't played right.  Specifically, the end couldn't be played.  That's when I realized that the file has been corrupted. 

I then have to recopy everything using the old way (network file copy), test the result, and everything seemed normal.

Once again it shows that something is odd when copying stuff to and from USB media.  I probably need to spend time to figure out why later, but for now I'll try to stick with network file copy.