Hi folks, my son James has a Macbook (2011) running OS Sierra (latest OSX this machine can run). His Photos library (~90GB) is on his 1TB external drive (WD) currently and it opens and all things seem fine with it, but the drive is near full. He bought a new 4TB external drive (Seagate) and we tried the Apple discussion method of drag and drop the entire Photos library file over to the newly formatted (OSX Journalled) drive. It ran for quite some time (~24 hours) and then the next morning there was a (cannot copy, file error 36). Tried reformatting and again same error. Did some online searching of this error code and it seems a common error. Eventually after much trying, the drive became unreadable - would not mount on any of the Macbooks in the house. He returned it to seller who replaced it. We now have the replacement 4TB drive where we reformatted again to OS Extend Journalled. This time we tried the copying process using the Show Package Contents of the source library and by individual folder copy over to the new root folder "Photo Library Copy" on the destination drive. Most of the folders within the package are System folders except for the folder called "Masters". The Masters folder contains an orderly number of subfolders hierarchically structured by Year>Month>Date of the import when an Import was done to the Photos database. His Photos library starts at year 2000 when iPhoto was the application in OSX and at the time when he did his OSX update, a migration process to Photos was run first open. But I digress. When copying over the Masters subfolders, it would go quite ok for many folders and eventually some files within folders would give error 36. A second attempt and sometimes they would copy successfully and others not so, so we would skip over these files. Once completing this copying process with forensic attention to folder "Get Info" on folder size and file count, we finished. Then checked all folders present as per the source Photos library (apart from those files not copied due to error 36). Attempted to launch the library and Photos opened and says Repair needed. Repair got to 5% then hung for a long while and then said "Cant repair". Tried a different tack then. Reformatted the drive again (Mac OS Jouranelled again) and attempted to Create New Photos library on the blank drive. Success. This opened. 4 options in how to bring photo images into library presented. Drag and drop from source was chosen. So with Finder tiled with the new Photos library, systematically dragged (at the image file level - not folder level) images over into the Photos panel. Tried one first, it worked. Then more. It was going very well, we got to 2007 year folder. Then error 36 again! I had to quit for a while as busy doing Work From Home at the same time making it difficult. Ended up closing Photos and having a look at the package contents of the new library. Unsurprisingly all subfolders folders (from each drag/drop action) sitting within one Masters folder labelled "2020". Then the folder from the last drag drop when error occurred contained images up to the one before the image which had caused the error 36. I thought there may be a subfolder count limit and figured if I waited until today - the date increment would force the creation of a new level 2 subfolder and hence the count issue theory I had thought of would be either proven or not. So this morning we tried and having properly ejected the drive last night, this morning it wont mount! I meant to also say that having reached a road block on the Photos library copying, the other purpose for James buying the 4TB drive was to hold a lot of his other data information (iTunes library eventually), downloaded movies etc. We tried to drag a movie file over - and that faulted too with the same error. It seems the problem is not limited to just Photos. I had previously checked that the Drive permissions were Read and Write so that seems ok. I am a bit stuck right now. Sorry it's so wordy but without all the information, others may be thinking 'did you try this'... I hope there are others out there whom have successfully circumvented this one...
Kind Regards Peter Crisp
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