Needle In a Haystack

Friends,
I'm trying to make a copy of a host folder on my MacBook that totals files and folders worth: 5.21 GB.

As you can guess this takes a while, but each time I return the copying has stopped somewhere well short of the full load because of a certain, nonsense file or file name that cannot be copied.

Worse, of the times I was able to find the problem file ( and delete it ) the re copying, starts all over again from the beginning?

Now, I don't mind that but looking for these buried files is becoming almost impossible and certainly more time consuming than I have time for.

Concerning this last file blocker I cannot even find it at all.

How can I:

1. Better find the file ( search box is not finding it ).
2. Find another way to backup, sync or copy these files so that they do not start over each time I try again

Help,
Bernard

Perhaps the file is one of those hidden files. If you have mainmenu you can select "show invisibles" under finder. Does the file name start with a period?

You could try the free RsyncX, it is basically a GUI for UNix's built in archiving and synching commands

That should let you copy the files with less hassle and you can sepcify specific folders to copy

When finder stops copying it is just telling me that brown/pink ( the file name I guess ) is not a valid name and/or has characters that cannot be copied. That I know but cannot find this file anywhere.

And, stopping the copying process to the external drive on the network just because of one file freaks me out because of the starting over deal.

Do either of you know another sync way ( short of RsyncX ) that would pick allow me to backup to a specific loacale without recopying the whole thing everytime?

Sounds to me that you are copying an oddly named file from the Mac to another OS which does not like the name. For instance, some characters are usable on OS X while Windows rejects them and any file copying that has them.

I think halting the copy on the first error is a 'feature' of drag & drop or GUI-style file copying - it's the same under Windows.

The only other way I know without using 3rd party software would be to use a terminal command to do the copy. There's an example of the copy command here. However if you're not comfortable with using terminal commands it can be a bit daunting, and prone to error if you get the parameters wrong!