Longstanding "move files" issue has alarmed Leopard users

FYI, I believe this bug has been fixed in 10.5.1.

i wish i read this oh, 30 minutes ago... thank god for time machine

This is an embarrassing problem for Apple, especially since it is built on a solid unix system. One of unix's strong points is that it is a collection of very small tools that can be chained together with pipes and redirects.

If the move command was built by combining copy and delete, it could be represented as "if (copy $1 $2) rm $1; else rm $2" (pardon my pseudocode). Meaning, perform the copy, and if the operation is successful, delete the original. If it fails, remove whatever was copied to the destination (like rolling back a transaction).

I don't consider myself to be an expert programmer by any means, but if I was in a position of creating the move command, I'd follow a procedure like the one above. If I couldn't implement it correctly, it wouldn't be available to the user.

Let's hope Apple reads sites like this and realized how much this concerns us.

This is a serious problem. I'm a complete Apple convert, but this sucks. I lost 70 gigs of Data whilst reorganizing things to make room on a drive to then enable Time Machine, ironic...

There were no errors on the disk (had repaired earlier with Disk Utility) and I was simply moving a folder from one USB2 drive to a Firewire one (or the other way, can't remember) It bombed out with an error, I clicked ok, and the WHOLE folder was gone on the source, but only half it's contents existed on the destination!

Then i tried a few different data recovery programs, but they only allowed recovering the data that i had deleted from the drive earlier, not the contents of that folder. However OSX destroyed it resisted casual data recovery. Luckily the data whilst most annoying was not mission critical, merely movies i'd time consumingly ripped from my DVD collection to stream to Apple TV.
Fix this Apple, NOW, or release a software update to disable the move operation until this is fixed if you can't get it working now.

I won't ever go back to windows (unless things change a big way well down the track, ie Win95 vs System 8, i felt at the time Win95 had passed Mac OS) but this is seriously basic stuff, this is basic OS stuff, I can't believe this bug exists.

PS I love my iPhone :)

I never knew that you could move between drives in Mac OS :-O I've looked, but only in the most basic places. And now that you tell me, you scare me from doing it :)

has anyone else had a problem recreating this problem?

If the files are important enough, they should never just be plainly moved from one volume to another. I always copy/delete when moving files. When I'm sure the copies are good, then I delete the source. It may take an extra minute or two (whooptidy-doo), but to me it just seems like better practice.

Frank - if you can't see the humor in calling someone who goes by the nom de plume of Frank Furter, aka frankfurter, aka a hot dog, then you really are an uptight person, and the only Troll here.

You're quite the "my way or the highway" kind of guy, aren't you? You don't like Windows, and anyone who has anything that isn't 100% anti-windows is a troll to you. Get over yourself, buddy, it's just software on a computer. If something so simple as this can cause you so much hatred and vitriol, then I think you need to get outside a little more often, seriously.

I'm not going to go reinstall Windows just to prove you wrong, as this is just about all the time and attention that your trolling is going to get from me, but I'll say it again. Windows does some things better than OS X. Whether you like it or not. I'd never go back to Windows unless OS X really started sucking and Windows became a more viable option than Linux, but at least I am mature enough to admit that the OS I use isn't the best at everything, and you know what, I am also mature enough to just live with that fact. I'm not going to lose sleep over that fact, and if yo are, you need help.

I'm not the only one to recall from my Windows days that a failed move of multiple files was not an issue because the files weren't moved until the batch completed, but I wouldn't bet my life on it either. IT WAS NEVER AN ISSUE FOR ME. I'm sorry that offends you so much.

So, in your 8,000 files exampe, even if you're correct, let me make a suggestion: DON'T DO THAT. Try copy and paste, then manually delete. Problem solved. That doesn't mean that a MOVE for smaller numbers of files doesn't make sense. I doubt the typical user is moving that many files.

There's another solution for your failed example as well. Instead of trying to figure out by hand what files moved and what didn't, why not copy them all back to the original source, select "do not overwrite" and "apply to all" options. Voila, all your files are back in place, and you can start all over again.

All of that aside, this is serious bug in Finder's move operations. We can debate all week long whether move should be an option in the first place, but Apple offers it as one, and it is causing people to lose files. They need to fix it fast, or disable it.

That's the last feeding your hot dogging trolling's gonna get from me. Take care.

Chris, I have no doubt you've chosen Night Train over Kool-Aid. If my point that one should copy and then delete the files is different from your later claim that one should copy and then delete the files, you're right; you didn't agree with me. I'm at a loss where you think these "other steps" are coming from. But seriously, don't explain it. I don't care.

"If you MOVE them, the ones that made it to their destination are GONE from their origin."

But at least they aren't tossed into the abyss. They can still be retrieved from the destination and the files that were on the source at the time there was a disconnect are still there.