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Problem transferring photos to SanDisk drive
I have a 2TB SanDisk drive. Just now I tried to transfer 23 photos and videos to the drive from the Photos app. I opened Files and Photos in split screen. I selected the photos in the Photos app and dragged to the drive's icon in the Files app. It showed a message with a countdown circle saying something like 'transferring 23 files'. The operation completed after a few minutes. But only 3 of the files had actually transferred.
Any idea what is going on or how to troubleshoot this? The drive is in ExFAT and has over 1 terabyte of space left.
Comments
There have been many times for me when the files app acts as if it's done doing something but really it's not done but is working in the background. Then files appear later. You might want to give it some time to see if anything changes.
The countdown circle may be for the converting (preparing stage) rather than for the actual copy progress.
You might see if using the Share sheet from Photos works better than drag/drop.
I've also had cases where force-closing the files app and re-opening has caused things on external sources to re-appear after they've disappeared.
Thanks Ed, I will certainly try this next time and in some testing just now this seemed to work reliably (bit late though, see below!). My question would be though, why should drag and drop not work reliably?
I tried this, it didn’t work unfortunately.
It never said preparing when trying to drag and drop. All the times I ‘successfully’ dragged and dropped stuff, it said it was importing them. I have only seen any ‘preparing’ message when doing the Share Sheet operation Ed mentions above.
This has been an absolute disaster - yesterday I transferred, in batches, about 1TB of files from the Photos app to that hard drive. Mostly vids, mainly screen recordings, then some travel vids. Scanning through the files on the hard drive now, I see that there is definitely loads of stuff missing. It is impossible for me to tell how many screen recordings are missing, but the nature vids stand out because of their green colour etc, and there are only few handfuls there, where there should be hundreds. I have browsed through all the files numerous times now to double check, so I am certain on this. I already deleted the files I transferred yesterday from my iPad, before realizing that there was something wrong. so these are just gone.
If the Files app says it has completed an operation but hasn’t, it is truly a worthless piece of shit. I have restarted my device, force quit the Files app, disconnected and reconnected the Files app, no joy. Really a disaster.
I can let it go, I am not going to grieve over it, there just isn’t any point. But I am stunned that the Files app would tell me it has successfully dropped them there when it hasn’t. I wonder if this is an iPadOS 18 issue? Seems unlikely. Is it related to the external drive? Also seems unlikely. The few times when I did this previously, I paid attention, and everything transferred. Those were smaller batches so it was easy to monitor. Doing that bulk job yesterday, I didn’t check everything due to the sheer number of files involved. In future I will have to perhaps make a folder on the drive each time I transfer a batch, so I can quickly check if the number of files involved the folder matches the number I have transferred. What a shitshow.
Thanks all for your input anyway.
Did you check "recently deleted" to see if any of the stuff you deleted is there?
I think there are "recently deleted" sections in both the files app and in the photos app.
I deleted all the stuff from Recently Deleted in the Photos app yesterday, as my aim in transferring the stuff was to clear space on my device. It was only when I went to do another small batch of stuff freshly transferred from my video camera to my iPad that I realised this drag and drop method was unreliable. Ughhh
The only way to reliably copy files on iOS is to jailbreak and use [s]cp 😃. (sorry, I know I'm useless as always, but I think it's still pretty much unique in the entire history of computing -- and I'm not exaggerating -- that an operating system can't reliably copy files, nor even reliably fail.)
Exactly man... Not only does it fail or do the job, it actually lies to me that it did the job properly. This is truly next level fuckery lol. I thought what I experienced here was some weird outlier case, I am staggered to realise others have also run into issues with this. I've never really had any need til now to deal with external storage.
Yes the whole Files App management system is beyond a joke, it took ages to actually get it, still it’s half-baked and really unreliable, after early usage with a memory stick I stopped using it and returned to the umbilical cord method.
Fwiw, I’ve corrupted usb drives before with the ipad. It’s a known issue, mainly caused by eject process.
Yes it's a well-known problem, and bafflingly not fixed after years. Just like Bluetooth speakers or headphones randomly going to max volume without any user interaction. That's actually a health hazard. Been there since at least iOS 14. No fix!
For me, before I add ANY new feature, I'll FIRST at least TRY to fix (or implement workarounds for) ALL known bugs in a system.
But I'd also pay my debt off before I buy anything unnecessary or, even worse, taking on MORE debt 😃
(but I mean, Ireland has a national debt of 240,000,000,000 EUR and the prospect of paying 7% of that off with the Apple tax money wasn't even considered...)
There doesn’t seem to be any eject process now though!
And thats a big part of the problem
Apple has only ever reluctantly been dragged into supporting external storage. I feel like they do the minimum to get by because they make profits on their ridiculously over priced internal memory.
It's not incompetence. One has only to look into the engineering brilliance of the Apple File System (APFS), then compare that to the abominable rest of the file management system to know that it's not lack of skill, but lack of motivation, that has landed us in 2024 with file management that is far short of what was available 30(!) years ago in Windows 95.
But what u gonna do? They're the only viable game in town for what we all do here.
Traditionally, OSes freak out about pulling drives without ejecting first because they are always potentially lying to you about the actual writing of the data on the receiver. The eject process is a mechanism to correctly resolve writes that are in-flight, or scheduled, even though the user has likely already seen the "progress" as complete in the UI.
For whatever reason, Apple's system seems to just lose things in that queue in some scenarios. I've seen this a lot not just with external storage, but also iCloud syncing. I've especially noticed these kinds of issues when drag & dropping from Photos. Sometimes the photos/videos show up on the other end, sometimes they don't. Being a very opaque system, it's really hard to understand what went wrong and avoid it in the future. I've learned to just avoid directly dragging stuff out of Photos and deal with the extra annoyance of properly sharing/exporting them.
NAS storage and backup is the best solution in that you control it yourself, but it’s certainly not that portable in most cases.