Massive File Transfer from Mac to PC

I have a studio with a few macs, and we decided it was stupid to keep all our files separate in different folders on different machines, and bought a PC windows XP server with a massive 1TB hard drive to store all our data on.

We hooked it up, set it up with all the machines and it seems to be working fine. Now this a massive quantity of files we're talking about here.. close to 300GB of all kinds of image files, photoshop, office, entourage backups and more... And they all need to go from the macs to the PC.

But every few files there is a problem.. either the file names are too long, or there's some kind of read error.. and every time there's a problem, the transfer stops and I have to figure out where to start it from again.

Is there a solution for this? and please don't say "get a mac server" buying a new mac now is just way to expensive.. this tiny little Asus pc cost about $500 and is faster than most of the macs we got.. I'm very happy with it.

There has to be some program that converts mac files to windows while transferring.. or something like that.. I don't know.

Heck, I just want to get the files over to the PC.

Help?? Anybody?

Thank you so much!

How about a NAS solution?

You're might be better off if you wipe out windows and load some slice of linux, like ubuntu or suse.

Ultimately I think you realize that you made a bad choice when buying this PC to store all your files. There are many reasons to not do what you did. Forcing it to work might result in months of frustration.

Are you backing up this 300gb? Or is the PC the backup?

What do you mean by NAS?

And come on, don't give me this ****... the PC is fine and it's doing it's job. There isn't a single reason not to go with it. It's fast, small, cheap and works well. The only problem is Mac / PC compatibility. And if that's the only problem, I doubt the next computer i'll get would be a mac. I just don't see where all that extra money is going..

You might want to look at Thursby's Dave software for a solution. It solved a whole lot of mac/pc communication nits for me in a combined environment. XP doesn't mind long names, but it's really picky about special characters in those names. The router may not be able to handle the large file demands if it hasn't the bandwidth or isn't in full duplex. good luck.

Try hooking the mac directly to the windows server with either a firewire or usb cable, if not already.

Maybe use applescript to filter out the error files, i.e., take the files with x amount of characters in the file name, and place them in a file, and continue with the next issue. Get the main files transferred, then figure out the problem with the rest.

Maybe? Not sure, just spouting here.

Your initial post suggested that you were a Mac shop, and that you bought a PC as a central place to store files.

If you were interested in cheap solutions instead of all your time getting it to work, and this, as you put it "PC / Mac compatibility" issue perhaps you would have posted first and asked opinions.

A NAS, or Network Attached Storage solution is perhaps even cheaper than a PC and usually supports AFP out of the box. Take a look at LaCie for some options.

Macs have certain requirements as well as capabilities that PC's don't always support. Also storing files on a PC can be disastrous. File corruption at the resource fork level can cause all your files to be unreadable by all your programs. I have seen this happen many times.

It's your data. A cheap PC might turn into an expensive one if you aren't careful.