Tiger server vs Leopard client file copying problems?

[BobSmith]

I'm still researching this.  I'm posting here to see if by some chance someone has noticed a similar behavior.

I have two Tiger servers (OS-X Server 10.4.11).  One is where my image archives live on a variety of drives.  The other is primarily a web server.  My two main workstations are running Leopard.  The client computers normally have multiple sharepoints from both servers mounted via AFP at any given time.  In my usual image editing workflow I'm working off of files directly on the server.  Everything is connected by gigabit ethernet.  This is has all worked well and flawlessly until the client upgrades to Leopard.  I'm losing random files when a client computer copies a batch of files from a volume on one server to a volume on the other server.

If I take a folder with 200 jpegs on the file server and drag that folder over to a volume on the web server, the copy process seems to occur normally.  The progress window in the finder shows 200 files to be copied... the process completes without any errors.... but the resulting folder on the web server will only contain maybe about 195 files.  If I do the same copy several times, each time a slightly different number of files survives the process, but all 200 never make it.  The missing files are different files each time.

I've never seen this problem when doing the exact same process where the client computers are running Tiger.  I've also not seen it when a client computer is copying from one volume to another where both volumes are on the same server.  The more files there are in a folder, the more likely this is to occur.  I think... though I've not tested this well yet... that the problem is more likely to occur with a folder containing a large number of small files as opposed to a large number of larger files.  In other words, a folder of 200 web sized jpegs will have this problem while a folder of 200 DNGs will not.

I'll post this on some server specific support lists but I thought I'd throw it out here as well.

Bob Smith

[peterkrogh]

Bob,
I have had similar experience dropping files in transfer, and it scares the hell out of me.  One cause has been an inexplicable intermittent Finder crash.  Unfortunately, this seems to happen only in file transfer (10.4.11 to 10.4.11 macs over gigabit ethernet).  If the finder crashes during transfer, then the copy aborts with no warning.  Unless I *see* it happen, the finder recovers and there is no way to tell it happened other than to do a folder compare.  Yuck.

For critical transfers, I am now almost always using software to manage the process. I use Chronosync (with the compare feature enabled) when I transfer images to the archive.  I'm hoping that Marc will get around to adding transfer validation to ImageVerifier.

I'd love to be updated as to what you find out.
Peter