Moving events to an external hard drive.

I'm seriously running out of space on my mac's had drive and so decided to invest in a 3TB external one. (Seagate GoFlex Desk External Drive)

The problem is that now I'm trying to move events in to the hard drive and it's reaching a certain point on Media Management on the background tasks and then stopping. It reached 23% after about 5 minutes and has stopped there for the last half an hour. It doesn't seem like it's going to move past that point. What could be the problem?

If media management is giving you problems, you can simply close FCPX and copy the events folder to your new drive in the finder.

Okay thanks

But a very important question is if, after i copy the folder in to the external hard drive, i delete the original, is that going to get rid of it in final cut pro?

I've been doing interviews that last hours which I'm really happy with and if I lost one I may have a break down lol.

FCPX will look at the root of every connect hard drive for an Final Cut Events folder. As long as your event is in a folder (doesn't matter which drive) you won't lose anything.

The event folder and the project folder are portable, so as long as all the necessary components inside are there, it doesn't matter which drive they get moved to.

It seems like even when I move the folder in finder it reaches about 40Gb worth of the event and then stops. It's worked on some of the smaller files but the larger files just are taking forever to transfer.

It predicted an hour to transfer the file to the hard drive on the finder but after about half an hour it stopped moving for hours until I had to unplug the hard drive to do anything. I tried again and again it stopped after a certain point, although that point was different each time. The furthest along it's gotten is about 73% before stopping.

Does a firewire make things faster? I'm currently using a USB to connect it to my mac.

Sounds like you have either corruption in your event, or a failing hard drive.

If the hard drive is empty, or you can erase all the data on it, a good way to verify it's good idea to reformat it in disk utility.

- Open Disk Utility and select your drive. Select the erase tab (this will destroy all data on your drive). Select security options and slide the slider over 1 so that it says "This option writes a single pass of zeros over the entire disk..." This will verify every bit on the drive and find any bad/unusable ones. If you got a bad drive you'll most likely find out at this step. This will take hours to complete. I do it every time I buy a new hard drive before I do anything else.

If you have corruption in your event, it's likely a render or transcoded file. You can safely delete the render folder, everything there will be recreated as needed. If you have all of your original media, you can delete the transcoded media as well. As long as you have the original media, this is also easy to recreate. Getting rid of those 2 folder should drastically reduce the size of your event.

If you can't reformat your disk, and you don't want to delete anything out of the event, then go through all the transcoded media and original media file by file and see if there's one that won't play or even load a thumbnail. If there is one, that's a corrupted clip, and deleting it should allow you to copy.

So in future I shouldn't optimise off of my mac's hard drive because that corrupts the files?

I don't want to corrupt them but at the same time I do need them optimised for them to run smoothly due to the way they're being recorded.

Is there a way of optimising without corrupting the file?

You should really not be using your system hard drive for video editing/writing/encoding as good practice.

Optimizing itself does not corrupt files, but eliminating as many files as possible can narrow down the source of your copy errors.

I'm curious: how is your external drive formatted? Drives formatted as FAT-32 (DOS) can't write files larger than 4GB. It may be copying smaller files and then getting hung on a 4GB+ one.

Just a thought. As mentioned earlier, a fresh format of the drive could cure your ills.

Cheers,
Bill

I'm sorry I'm a complete novice when it comes to external hard drives and final cut too if I'm honest.

How can you tell how your external hard drive is formatted and what would giving it a fresh format entail?

If you highlight your drive on the desktop and do a Get Info (Command-I), what does it say under Format? It should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If it's not, open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) and click on the Erase tab. You'll lose any data on the drive, so make sure you have everything on another volume.

Cheers,
Bill

When I get info it actually does say Mac OS Extended (Journaled) What's the next step?

Also now that I've been transferring data back and forth from my hard drive, my project says missing event on every tab. Is there a way I can get that back? Please say yes.

By the way thanks for everyone's help so far. I really want to get this sorted out because I need to keep interviewing people but I can't until I know this will all work.

Drives are the correct format, that's all, nothing more to do there.

Um, transferring what specific data, back and forth specifically how?