The macOS Finder interface has gone through many changes over the years. Some of these have been major, while others are merely cosmetic. One thing that has endured is the ability to drag and drop files and folders. In most cases the easiest way to move or copy a file is to just drag it where you want it and drop it there. However, you may have experienced cases where dragging and dropping large amounts of files hasn’t worked properly.
This can happen when there is a file that is corrupted or damaged in some way that doesn’t allow the file to be copied or moved. When this happen, the Finder cancels the entire transfer even if it has apparently already copied some or even most of the data. The slow way around this is to drag and drop files one-by-one until you discover which item is the problematic one. What if I told you there was a better way?
Here at Small Dog, we use Carbon Copy Cloner to perform most data copying tasks. This program installs a cloning “engine” on your machine and uses this to perform the copy. This engine is smart and will skip over problematic files and copy everything it can. When the task completes, you can open a History window and see which files were skipped, the total amount of data copied and how long the copy took.
Carbon Copy Cloner has a number of other useful features as well. It can be used to create a bootable clone of your entire hard drive, and every Mac can be booted from an external drive, so if your hard drive fails but the computer is otherwise working, a bootable clone can get you back up and running in just the time it takes to boot the machine again. It can also create scheduled clones so you can, for example, create a bootable clone every night so that you always have a recent version to boot from. With the SafetyNet feature enabled you can get a file history, similar to Time Machine, so that you can find older versions of files if needed.