One of the things that drives me crazy is to keep hearing… it’s coming in Longhorn.. it’s coming in Longhorn.. it’s coming in Longhorn… I am very excited about what will be coming in Longhorn, although also a tad nervous about what else might be coming in Longhorn (DRM ala mode, etc.). On the other hand I consistently have real problems with real software in XP here and now today.
This morning I was trying to back up one of my hard drives that I keep my mp3s on. The hard drives are both external Maxtor 250 gig drives. So I select all the folders on the one drive and then try and drag it over to the 2nd drive to copy and get an error message that it cannot copy.
WTF? How about more detail in the error message. It said “couldn’t read from the source” I also get the can’t copy due to I/O device error one a lot too. Instead, how about “can’t copy because file XYZ is corrupt.” Now I have to go folder by folder in alllllllll of the subfolders and copy them each over individually until inevitably I find some file or folder somewhere that is the culprit. This is really a pain and totally unacceptable. It’s a really inconvenient way to do a really important thing — back your data up. And here’s another great idea. How about instead of just saying can’t copy, include a little box that says “would you like for Windows Explorer to copy all of the files that it can copy and not copy the ones giving us the problem here. How about that idea!
So my question is does anyone know of an alternative way to back up a drive without doing a drag and drop through Windows Explorer? Are there other utilities out there that are better at moving files around than Windows Explorer? And why does this keep happening with my Maxtor external drives. Are they just poor drives that consistently corrupt data? Is it that some of my CDs that I’ve ripped have some kind of hidden DRM in them that I’m not aware of that somehow kill my whole copy job? I’d love to hear a better explanation on why copying all of my files on one drive to a backup drive is so damn difficult.