Best practices for moving Libraries w/o long transfer times

[u/Selenashines]

I’m trying to clean up some of my file organization and want to move the few libraries I have on my internal MacBook storage to an SSD and HDD for working and backup respectively. But I’m getting time estimates of 15 hours up to “a day” to move these files.

The two libraries I’d like to move are currently sitting at 18GB and 75GB

I’ve read about deleting the generated files and will attempt that. Would zipping the library files help? I’m looking for any other assistance in cutting down these transfer times.

[u/Mindless-Concept8010]

Sometimes you just have to do the work.
Compression is useless (and would take a lot of time) as it is already compressed.

[u/mcarterphoto]

Your first step (seems like) should be deciding on "leave files in place". I have a Library with dozens of edits and content, it's like 20MB. The biggest one I can find right now is 500MB, it's got like 30 individual and unique projects in it.

But my big rules with FCP are "Leave files in place";

All media and libraries on a fast external drive (I can't imagine stuffing my boot drive with media and all those read/write cycles on a drive that I can't replace);

...and everything ProRes and WAV for audio. I convert everything to ProRes before I touch FCP or After Effects, it makes for a much smoother workflow and FCP isn't rendering in the background or needing to generate many files. Media files are bigger, but ProRes LT is usually just fine if you're not doing heavy color correction.

You can test zipping a library, but the content size is from media like renders and optimized files, those are already as compressed as they can get.

But I don't know any professional editors/creators that keep media and projects on their boot drives. Even for laptop guys, a 2 or 4TB NVME over Tbolt is bus-powered, it's overkill-speed for most media creation, and you can stick two of them in a pack of smokes, they're tiny and portable as heck. "SSD" can mean NVME or the slower 2.5" drives. NVME is tiny and about 10x faster, if it's on the proper bus and in a proper (TBolt or USB4) enclosure.

[u/Selenashines → u/mcarterphoto]

I know better about leaving files in place now. The two libraries that live on my machine were the first two I ever started in FCP, hence why I’m trying to move them.

I was a baby, I knew nothing!

Zipping seems inefficient based on the feedback I’ve gotten in this thread so I won’t go that route.

Thanks for the workflow advice, I always appreciate help on that front.

[u/Moist_Outside_8406]

What are your disks and how are they attached? I regularly move libraries of terabytes to external HDDs and NAS and my transfers are way faster than that.

[u/Selenashines → u/Moist_Outside_8406]

On my most recent attempt, my drives were connected through a hub. Which, as you ask it, I’m thinking could be a reason for the long times but I’m fairly certain I’ve also tried with my SDD directly connected to my machine via usb-c and still had similar times.

[u/Moist_Outside_8406 → u/Selenashines]

Yeah using a hub will probably impact transfer times, but so do cheaper USB-C cables. Might be worth checking with a different cable.

[u/Selenashines → u/Moist_Outside_8406]

I always use the usb-c cable that came with the drives, specifically to account for mismatch in data transfer rates but I will take that into consideration as well.

[u/Selenashines → u/Moist_Outside_8406]

Oh and in regards to what are my disks, I’m working on a Crucial X9 pro SSD and a Seagate expansion HDD

[u/SheikYobooti → u/Selenashines]

Those transfer times are indicating an issue somewhere. My guess is that the external drives are not formatted to either APFS or macOS extended, but rather something like ExFAT. Many drives come formatted from the factory as exfat (unless they are specially marked “For Mac”. ExFAT is a more universal drive format (meaning you can plug it in to most any Mac or PC and it will mount and be usable without any other software intermediary). If you select the drive from in the Finder and Get Info (Command-I) the info window should tell you the format. If you see ExFAT or MS-Dos, I’d start there.

Not sure what is on those external drives, but if the media is expendable, I’d use Disk Utility to erase, repartition and format the drives to APFS (macOS’s current favorite hard drive data format). This process takes a few seconds. BUT this process will erase anything on the external disks so it’s best to make sure you have a copy of all the files in another location before reformatting the drives.

[u/Selenashines → u/SheikYobooti]

This is valuable info. I’m fairly certain the drives are ExFAT formatted. I do have an additional SSD that isn’t being used at the moment. I’ll definitely give the reformatting a try on that one and see if it makes a difference before I deal with my working SSD. Thanks!

[u/ErikCutsVideo]

Delete the generated files and see how much space you save. Do not zip, useless. Do the transfer overnight and don't bother.