It's not a limit 'on the entire drive' it's a limit on files/directories contained in a single directory.

As it's failing on "/mnt/usbdrive/Batch 2" I'd be inclined to start by looking at the number of files/directories in that....

ls "/mnt/usbdrive/Batch 2" | wc -l


If you get an answer over 10,000 then it would seem to support the idea that this might indeed be the problem.

18781

also, the reason I mentioned for the entire drive, is because i already have a similar folder, batch 1, on this hard drive already. so that maybe it was a total thing

So if it's really per folder, how could I go about rsync'ing just folders who's names start with characters up through say the letter L to one folder on the external drive, then the remaining to another folder? Maybe splitting them up like that would work, and it would be logical for the users to do it alphabetically.

I guess ideally I'd want symbols,numbers, letters through L in one, then M-Z in the other. since that's how i think it naturally sorts them. I just dont know how to do it.

I should probably open a new topic for this, as knowing how to do that might be useful for someone else. Then I can report back here if that solved the problem that I originally posted about.

A few posts ago you said that the drive was actually a RAID1 device and it was using the software driver which came with it.

This is not a NAS, or is it? If you have really two separate disks which are RAIDed by software on your computer, do you have drivers for all 3 OS-es?

jlinkels

It's a USB external hard drive with 2 1TB hard disks, that you can either RAID0 for 2TB usable space, or RAID1 for 1TB but redundancy. Wherever I plug the external USB drive in now, it recognizes it as a 1TB external drive. it's not a NAS. I used a utility that came with the drive to setup the RAID1 on the hard drive.

Frankly I don't think these questions have anything to do with your problem, I am just interested as I am extremely unfamiliar with the latest hardware gadgets. Last year I made a giant leap forward by installing sda RAID in my server.

Do you have a specification of this device? Also I am a bit surprised about that 'own' driver while Linux has tried and true mdadm. But unusable for Win & Mac of course.

Have you checked this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table for any constraints you are trying to exceed? It is also interesting to see that some limitations are in Windows and not in the FAT specification.

Have you tried to do the copy action on a single drive? That is without using the RAID drivers? If that succeeds, that would preclude problems with VFAT, directory structure, number of files, etc.

jlinkels

I've been able to copy individual folders to my desktop, but i dont have enough space to try the whole thing, unless i copy it to one of these drives that are identical to the one i'm having problems on.

I'd really like to try rsync'ing to two folders separating it half in one half in the other, if i could only figure out how.

I figured out how to do it, and that seems to have fixed my problems. I have only a few folders at the root, then have things broken into other subfolders under that, with the results of ls | wc -l being around 10,000 or so, I seem to be good. think it was related to fat32 and trying to jam too much into folders.