Harddrive HELP

Hi ALL.
I have two 600 gig external drives. One for use. One for backup. Periodically I wipe the backup and redrag the files from drive A to drive B.

First off. I am sure I am doing this the long way. Is there a better way than to open Disk Utility and wipe drive B prior to drag & drop?

Also I frequently get the message "contains one or more busy items that cannot be changed" at which point my file transfer comes to a complete hault.

Ideas?

Thanks.

Hi mactonight. First of all, welcome to Mac Forums!

To your questions:

1/ Is there a better way than wiping the disk? Probably not. The only other alternate would be to simply delete the current contents (and then empty the trash - that last step is critical!). That might be faster than the wipe if you don't have much datea, but if you have any serious volume of data it won't be.

2/ The busy files message is an alert that some process on your machine is still using one or more files. I have seen more than one software bug in my life that causes this to happen erroneously. You may be experiencing such a thing. If you are sure that you have stopped all such applications, and have no unexpected Finder windows or other things open on it (use Expose to be sure - F9 - shows all currently open windows) then I would recommend rebooting before you do the wipe and copy routine. That should resolve things.