How to copy 90GB worth of music to my mac?

Hey guys!

I'm new to this forum, so I hope I posted in the right section! I just recently received a used PowerBook G4 and I love it! It's much better than my W7 Acer Aspire One, even though the PB is like 7 years old ;D

I have one question though. I want to copy the 90GB worth of music off of my wireless music server onto my mac. I can connect it "as a server" in the finder, and then I can drag and drop folders onto my music drive, but I run into permission problems. If one folder out of 90 folders lacks read permissions, Mac OS will simply just stop the copying process all together, instead of giving me the option to "ignore this folder and continue"

So, I resorted to using the following UNIX command line:
This works, but I don't receive any progress indications in the Terminal window. If I use this command, will Mac OS X continue with the copy operation, even if I close the lid and "sleep" my powerbook?

Thanks for any help in advance!

What is the source? Is it a hdd? mac mini? whatcha got dude?

kylekling said:

What is the source? Is it a hdd? mac mini? whatcha got dude?

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Thanks for your fast response! The source is the HDD in my desktop computer in the other room. The desktop computer is running Ubuntu Linux, and I've set it up to share certain folders via the SAMBA file sharing client; the music folder being one of them. I am currently sharing via the wireless N router, which both computers are connected to.

So basically, my desktop computer comes up in Finder in the left pane under the "Shared" tab, and I can access any shared folders that way.

cp never gives any 'status'. It just does it. If you sleep your powerbook, the copy will stop.

This works, but I don't receive any progress indications in the Terminal window. If I use this command, will Mac OS X continue with the copy operation, even if I close the lid and "sleep" my powerbook?

Click to expand...

No, the copy operation will stop when the machine sleeps. Reason is that the hard drive also goes to sleep. And since that PB G4 is rather slow by today's standards, it's going to take awhile to copy 90 GB of music over especially using wireless. Hope you have lots of time to spare! ;D

Have you set sharing on the main folder itself that contains the music?

chscag said:

No, the copy operation will stop when the machine sleeps. Reason is that the hard drive also goes to sleep. And since that PB G4 is rather slow by today's standards, it's going to take awhile to copy 90 GB of music over especially using wireless. Hope you have lots of time to spare! ;D

Click to expand...

For real! I found that I can get it to copy the music, as long as I copy only ~8 albums at a time. Any more than that and I start running into weird permission errors.

Thanks for your help guys!

kylekling said:

Have you set sharing on the main folder itself that contains the music?

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Yepp, sharing is set with read-only permissions.

When it tells you that you don't have proper permissions - what does it say the permission belongs to?

Also what osx are you running? Would you say that the 8album cap it's placing is equivalent to just under 2gb?

kylekling said:

When it tells you that you don't have proper permissions - what does it say the permission belongs to?

Click to expand...

I'm not exactly sure. It basically told me "the operation could not be completed because you do not have privileges for this action." I restarted the computer, thus restarting the file sharing service, and file copying worked like a charm after that!

kylekling said:

Also what osx are you running? Would you say that the 8album cap it's placing is equivalent to just under 2gb?

Click to expand...

Running Leopard 10.5.8 with 512mb ram (victim of the lower RAM slot failure, too bad it's out of the repair period).

I wouldn't think that all 512mb are being used during the transfer though, since only "packets" of the files are transported at once. You may be right though, this was just my guess. I would've thought Leopard's memory protection would've prevented any sort of issue like that from happening.

I think the permissions issue may actually be a problem with Ubuntu, but I'm not exactly positive. I'm going to try to copy from a different computer with a different OS tomorrow and see if I run into the same problems