Verifying a File Transfer Created 15 years ago2009-03-09 01:06:51 UTC by TawnosPrime

I'm trying to get my computer ready to reformat, and I've got 120 some odd GB of files I want to keep which I'm transferring to an external HDD. Is there a program that will allow me to transfer the files and verify all files were copied and nothing was lost?...or at lest make sure nothing is lost in the transfer?

There's a program I use called TeraCopy that has this. Just turn on the "Test" feature while it's copying, and it will run a verification pass over the files once it's finished.

After I copy a "lump" of files to an external HDD or whatev, I just make sure the the number of "files", "folders", and the total "size" are identical ("size on disk" is always different fsr). To make it easy to verify, i just pull up properties of the file copied and the original, and compare them on screen side-by-side.

TeraCopy sounds pretty cool tho, i will have to check it out.

In any case, be sure you verify the new backup of your files before deleting the originals! (this is common sense, but you'd be surprised how being careless for a moment can cause you to lose your files!)

You mean transfers can sometimes fail!? Shi- I've reformated about 5 times now and I'd drag about 100 Gigs onto my externals. D: Looks like I found something to do today.

I'm not sure if they can fail or not, but when you're transferring 100 some odd gigs of stuff you've collected, I doubt one would want to take the chance, 'specially if some files were hard to come by.

Thanx for the prog Penguin.

If they fail it'd probably be down to a dodgy drive/cable/controller and you'd get warnings/errors in the event log if the error correction didn't take care of it. Human error when manually copying everything would be more likely