Server issues and exFAT

A side effect of regularly running out of space on my MBP is that I need to archive files over to my Ubuntu server (program files, lossless music, etc), as well as back up others.

This happens through my running cron jobs, alongside SuperDuper!

As I don't generally leave the monitor running on the Ubuntu box, I noticed recently that SuperDuper! wasn't working (it couldn't find a source drive).

Rebooting Ubuntu showed that power commenced, with the fans running, but a black screen (no text appearing at all) and no lights illuminated on keyboard. ssh didn't work either.

There's clearly a larger issue to resolve there (possibly related to graphics card), but before that I wanted to archive some data before my MBP was out of space.

The server has three internal drives, one of which is 120GB and dedicated to Videos, and another is 1TB for backup.

Also, there is an external 2TB WD drive.

I started with the latter, as ease of plugging into MBP made it the best place to start.

Sadly, it was read only. I realised I'd formatted in Ubuntu and couldn't write to it in OSX.

So the plan was to copy files, reformat and then copy back. Fortunately I had another 500GB drive I could use for this purpose.

Copying was easy (albeit slow, as both external drives were USB connected to MBP). Then, to check the contents were correctly copied, I ran

diff -rq folder1 folder2 > ~/Desktop.diffs.txt

Again, very slow output on this.

Now for formatting, Based on this article, I reformatted as exFAT. This should allow readability on Windows, OSX and Linux (with suitable packages installed). Reformat only took a few seconds.

Next stage, copy all files back, then re-run the "diff" command to double-check.

Then, delete the files from the 500GB drive, reformat THAT as exFAT, and then back up as necessary.

Final stage, remove the 120GB and 1TB drives from server, connect via a caddy to MBP, copy, diff, format and repeat...

THEN fix the server issue!