[ThisGuy]

Can anybody tell me the command to copy a directory (and its subdirectories) to another volume? I have a HD that is dying and I can't get it to copy using the Finder, but Terminal is working when I do individual files. I am doing this:

Code:
cp  /Volumes/stoker\ HD\ 1/Users/STOKER2245/ /Users/ThisGuy/Desktop/StokerBackup

and it is not working for me. If I navigate to the Documents folder I am able to copy individual files though. I know I'm doing something wrong.

[Phil Sherry]

i'm not sat at a Mac right now, so i can't test this, but i think you need cp -R in there. run man cp for more info.

[ThisGuy]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll try it out.
I did have some success using this:

Code:
mv /Volumes/stoker\ HD\ 1/Users/STOKER2245/ /Users/ThisGuy/Desktop/StokerBackup

I'll see what I end up with.

[turtle777]

You could also use Carbon Copy Cloner.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

-t

[ThisGuy]

Originally posted by turtle777:
You could also use Carbon Copy Cloner.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

-t

Tried it with no luck.

Both mv and cp -R seemed to work though.

[theolein]

Listen! A word of warning. If you have files in those directories that depend on resource forks, you will lose them with cp and mv. While these are rare on OSX these days, they do exist. Examples are textclippings and links, both of which store their contents in resource forks.

So, for instance, if you do a "cp somelink.webloc newlink.webloc" the copied link will be broken. And if you do that with mv, the link will be irretrievably lost.

If you have the developer tools installed, inside the tools folder, there are two utilities, CpMac and MvMac, that behave the same way as cp and mv, but also copy and move the resource forks.

The ditto utility can also copy directories with preserved resource forks. The format is:
"ditto --rsrc source_dir destination_dir"

[ThisGuy]

thanks for the info, theolein.
after messing around for a little bit i was wondering why it takes longer for a cp -R command to copy a file than it does for the Finder? i created a 40MB .dmg and on my PowerBook it took about 5 seconds to copy the file using the Finder. i did cp -R and the same copying took about 25 seconds.

[theolein]

Probably a damaged disk. Be thankful that you can at least still use the Terminal.