My mid-2014 Macbook Pro is acting up, suddenly it started not charging the battery and is now extremely slow with lots of beachballs. Apple Genius suspects it's a OS issue and wants to keep the MBP, reinstall the OS from metal and see if that helps. Well, I have lots of photos and a few video projects on it that I haven't had a chance to move over to my main external drive that houses all media.

How best to back-up/sync/move the data to that external drive? Doing it folder-by-folder manually will take an incredibly long time due to the quirkiness and slowness of the MBP, so I was looking for a software solution. I don't want to do a backup or sync, as I don't want the target drive to have items deleted as it's the main media storage location and I just need a few folders (like the Pictures) and attendant sub-folders and files moved. The issue is that I have periodically been manually copying data to the external, but haven't been deleting those folders from the MBP, so I have files that are in both locations, and those don't need to be re-copied.

CCC

and that is not CamelCamelCamel

Yeah.

Buy a new 2.5-inch external and clone to it. Deal with organizing copies on your "target" drive later.

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You can have Carbon Copy Cloner back up folders rather than the whole drive. Chronosync will do this, too, but I’m betting you have CCC.

CCC has a 30 day free trial period if you need to try before buy but it is worth it if you don't have it already. I vote for CCC also. I use Chronosync too for for specific folders but I believe you can buck up the entire drive if desired with it.

CarbonCopyCloner

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(BTW, it's spelled < y'all >.)

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Onamuji
Yeah. Buy a new 2.5-inch external and clone to it. Deal with organizing copies on your "target" drive later.

+1

I think we all agree CCC is the easiest solution for a straight "clone" of your drive, and then sort later. Sounds like it might take a long time if the drive is wonky... but more accurate than folder by folder transfer

$50 for a 1 TB portable drive is the norm these days.

After you get this resolved, get a backup drive big enough to store media and MBP drives... plug it in and turn on Time Machine... and then never get stuck again =)

and assuming the genius had you boot into safe mode, try a new user, etc, etc.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

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jdc
::snip::
and assuming the genius had you boot into safe mode, try a new user, etc, etc.

Hmm... no, he didn't. I think I know what I will be trying after work today. Thank you for the suggestions.

Thank you as well for the CCC idea, I didn't know that it would do just folders. I normally use Super Duper as I just manually clone my drives once a week on my desktop computer. (To which the external drive for media is attached.) I started it, but it errored out after a while. I think with the goal of getting this done quickly, I will take a spare drive and clone, if I can.

I'll look into Chronosync as well.

The Genius thought it's an OS issue, because he tried booting to their network drive that is for diagnostics, it started booting, with Unix commands, then timed out after a while, and auto-rebooted to the default internal drive. Does it make sense that the low-level pre-boot where one selects which drive to boot is part of the OS?

I personally think it's a hardware issue. Either way, I need to get my media off of it.

What's weird is that it happened suddenly, overnight, as it lay sleeping and charging. I awoke in the morning and went to use it, I noticed an amber charging light, not green, opened the MBP and saw 0% battery.

I like Carbon Copy Cloner... excuse me while I do a backup...

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That old man - he don't think like no old man...
Now I wouldn't want to be within 400 - 500 yards of one of them nuclear bombs when it goes off! WW1 Vet Old Man
"He's pinned under an outcropping of rock. Lucky for him, the rock kept the dirt from burying him alive."
If idiots could fly, this place would be an airport. And I'd be a TSA agent.
A bonified member of The Mystic Knights of The Sea, George P. Stevens, President. Andy Brown, Treasurer, Algonquin J. Calhoun, Legal Consultant.

For charging problems, the first thing to try should be an SMC reset.

[support.apple.com]

Quote

If the battery is nonremovable:

Shut down your Mac.
Using the built-in keyboard, press Shift-Control-Option on the left side of the keyboard, then press the power button at the same time. Hold these keys and the power button for 10 seconds.
If you have a MacBook Pro with Touch ID, the Touch ID button is also the power button.
Release all keys.
Press the power button again to turn on your Mac.

Also, if you do a shut down of the computer, so NO OS is running, does the battery charge? That would seem like a pretty reasonable test to decide between HW and SW problems. Seems a bit premature to jump all the way to Nuke and Pave without a bit more troubleshooting.

And, the mac running slowly when the battery is very low seems to be normal, lots of others report the same behavior. I remember something similar that was documented for the models with removable batteries, that the CPU would be put into a reduced speed/power mode if running with the battery removed. The reasoning was that at peak performance, the computer could draw more power than the charger could supply and would need additional power from the battery to assist. This may be what you're seeing with the fully discharged battery.

[www.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2017 02:54PM by GGD.

I have always used superduper and have used that for so long I can't remember why I prefer that over CCC. I do remember demoing CCC too. Is there some major advantage of one over the other?

I don’t think SuperDuper does the recovery partition; also, can you use it to back up individual folders? I haven’t used it in a while, but my recollection was that it does only a clone of the whole volume.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2017 03:58PM by ka jowct.

Yep, CCC—great software, great people.

First, I am 100% biased as CCC is our family's business - Mike and I put everything into CCC. We redesigned and modernized CCC from the ground up, both visually and under the hood, in 2012-2014, which cost us a lot of money and time.

Yes, CCC has always been able to back up your files, back up folders, create a bootable backup, back up the Recovery HD, and so much more. So far, we have everything working with High Sierra (unlike a competing product which I will not name). Apple's APFS support/compatibility has been evolving since the early High Sierra betas and we've been testing and working with it every step of the way. When High Sierra releases, Apple may throw some surprises our way (despite their "GM" release), but we have everything working to this point.

We've invested a lot to make our backup software as modern and ready for changes as possible, and that investment is finally paying dividends. We're as ready to go with this new OS as possible and we're really proud of it.

If you have any CCC questions or issues, I'm happy to help but putting a ticket from within CCC gets the experts far more info, so I'd recommend that!

Sarah

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I ended up doing what Onamuji recommended, though not by creating a true clone, but by doing a Finder copy of the Documents, Pictures, Movies and Music folders to the external drive. I could care less about the apps, if needed, I could always restore them. I tried CCC, but it timed out on me, then I also tried using another Mac as an intermediary and placed the sick MBP into Target Disk Mode, but trying CCC took forever, 3 hours into the process, it was still evaluating the files. It's nice that you can do just folder backups in CCC, but it just didn't work for me.

I took the MBP in Saturday, the Genius that helped me this time hooked it to a different power brick, and it did the same, wouldn't take a charge. This Genius off the bat said that it was a hardware issue, not software, because the minute he pulled the power supply off of the MBP, the MBP would die. So off it went for servicing, I'm already having Mac withdrawal, it's going to be a looooong week.