Sometimes I feel the need to go run into a wall. In attempting to backup a PowerMac G4 to an external HD, I found that I encountered errors in copying. The biggest annoyance with drag and drop method of backing up files on any system is poorly named files and folders. On both Mac OS and Windows, when such files and folders are encountered the OS stops the copying process and doesn't back up anything beyond the problematic file/folder. Often times I'd love for it to just skip the file and continue copying. I'd much rather have most everything and miss one file then skipping all those files.
The first problem I came across in OS X.3 were file names that containted a foward slash ("/"). Some OSs understand this character as part of a path to a location (i.e. HD/You Folder/Another Folder/A File.doc). This can be fixed with just renaming the file/folder by removing the character. In fact, there are utilites out there, depending on your OS, can help you find all those potential naming problems and fix them before the copy process. I've never used one because the problems I've run across are relatively small in number and can be done by hand.
The second problem that caused me some frustration was not quite as obvious. The error message I received was:
"You cannot copy the item Icon... because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display"
I kept going through files trying to find the culprit file and removing it. Needless to say, there were too many. It was not going to work with the previous method of renaming the file. However, I was on the wrong path all together. What I finally got around to figuring out was that the external HD I was using was formatted FAT32, instead of the Mac OS HFS+ format.
After I found another drive and reformatted it for exclusive use on Mac OS, everything copied over without a hitch. The problem really resided in that I keep my drives formatted FAT32 because I want to be able to use it across both Mac OS and Windows. However, some files in Mac OS just won't copy properly onto FAT32 to prevent problems.
Moral of the story, pay attention to the source as well as the destination.
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