Problem with moving a large folder to an external drive

[Jimmsp]

This post could also be in the "performance" area, but it does relate to how a number of folks move photos around.

A little background:
I am now using Win 10, and the latest LRCC.
I store my recent photos on my internal harddrive in a folder by year, with subfolders either by event, location or date (often both). Older ones are on an external HD.
A few days ago, I had my 2105 photos folder and 2014 photos on my internal hd.
At this time of the year, I generally move last year's photos to the external HD into a "history" folder to make room for the new upcoming year.

Now I wanted to move my 2014 Photos to the external drive. In the past, I had moved the folder via the Windows file manager, and just "refound" the missing folder in the Library.
This year, because of the known problems of "import" and "sync", I decided to let LR move them via the catalog; ie, just drag and drop the 2014 Photo folder in the LR Library. It has worked well for "small folders".

Big mistake.
LR moved about 1/3 of the photos and their folders before it decided to lock up. Windows 10 came back and asked to terminate the program.
Now I was left with 2 partial 2014 Photos folders, on my internal HD, and one on the external; and no easy way to know exactly what was where.

I was able to eventually fix this problem using (primarily) Windows file manager and my backup files.
I eventually set it up so that I just needed to relocate the 2014 Photos folder in LR.

My message - don't use the current LR Catalog to move a very large set (>90GB) of files and folders from one drive to another.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Oh dear, sorry to hear that Jim, and well done for fixing it.

Yes, for small folders, drag and drop works great. For larger volumes, I usually suggest moving it in Explorer/Finder and then using Find Missing Folder to relink them. The bit to remember is not to use Import or Synchronize in any LR version, should any less experienced users read this thread.

 

[Jimmsp]

Another bit I should have emphasized -- be sure you have independent backups of your files & folders before you go moving them around.

 

[clee01l]

The problem with large folders is that LR uses temp storage to stage intermediate files. If your exec the capacity of the primary drive, all sort of strange behavior could occur. This may be what bit you.

 

[Jimmsp]

The problem with large folders is that LR uses temp storage to stage intermediate files. If your exec the capacity of the primary drive, all sort of strange behavior could occur. This may be what bit you.

Unfortunately this was not the obvious problem. The 2014 moved folder was 258 GB in size, and I had over 400 GB of mostly contiguous empty space on the internal HD.