I have a large gallery folder which I frequently backup to an external drive (both are NTFS partitions). The gallery contains both images and videos in many subfolders, and some have about 40.000 images. In Windows I would always copy the main folder over to my external drive, and choose "write into" and "skip existing files". I tried this in Dolphin last night (openSUSE 12.2 / KDE 4.8.5) and the results were very weird and off.

Dolphin would work for several seconds to copy the files, but when I looked at the destination they didn't get copied. They would only copy properly if I went to each subfolder and dragged the files there manually (instead of letting it write into subfolders), and there are too many folders to be able to do that. Not sure if some files got copied, but certainly not all did.

Worst of all, Dolphin isn't even able to report the size and file count of the folder. Every time I open Properties and click the Refresh button, it shows random numbers. Once it says it's 40GB, then it's 13GB, then 30 GB, etc. Same with the number of files located there. This is a really major and worrying issue.

Is this a problem with how Dolphin / KDE / Linux interprets NTFS partitions, or is there another reason? Can it be fixed somehow? I need to be able to copy files and folders at any time, and if Dolphin can fail such a basic task it feels very risky using it.

While it sounds like I'm shifting the blame, ntfs is really a terrible file system. I've sometimes had to copy large amounts of data to ntfs hard disks and the write speeds are usually so slow (relative to ext4) that I'd just leave it overnight to finish!

Some ideas:

I'd suggest checking to see if there is any problem with the hard disk. Are there any error messages in your dmesg? You can also run udisks --dump in a terminal to get comprehensive report (including smart status) about all your disks. See if there is anything wrong with the ntfs disk.

Does dolphin finish copying the files? If it doesn't, maybe the problem is simply the slow write speed. Wait till it completes.

For a fail safe, you can resort to rsync from the command line, if you're comfortable with it...

The drive is in good condition, so there's likely nothing to check. Dolphin does finish copying (at least that's what it says in the system tray) but in practice it doesn't copy almost anything.

Someone suggested I try with the 'cp' console command or Midnight Commander, which I will next time. Eventually I might convert my ntfs partition to ext4 (since using a ntfs partition constantly like I am is hard), but only when I'm ready to let go of Windows beyond doubt for the most part.

I agree with the cp recommendation. rsync is a little more complicated, but is another good option. If you see similar issues with these commands, then it's probably not dolphin.

If there's only one or two windows machines you need to deal with, you might consider formatting the drive as ext4 and installing ext4 drivers on windows. You'll have to rely on google-fu/advice from other users for this as I'm rather unaware of possible solutions, but it should be possible.

I'm new to linux, but I'm using Debian/squeeze (2.6.32 kernel) and could also report such behavior with dolphin and KDE4.
I copied whole disk NTFS (about 700GB)to new also NTFS formated using rsync.
I wanted to check if all files was copied to ensure all data are OK, so I did it like I used on Windows in folder properties, when I see that file count is not equal for those disk I thought something is wrong with rsync configuration, or permission. I want check what files are missing, but I didn't find any manually, suddenly I realised that dolphin is showing different count if there is lot of files or subdirectories.
I think it is serious issue, but I don't worry because I plannig to switch to ext4.

Just to verify that this is a NTFS specific bug, could someone please try verifying this with a linux native file system such as ext3/ext4 as both the source and destination?

bcooksley wrote:Just to verify that this is a NTFS specific bug, could someone please try verifying this with a linux native file system such as ext3/ext4 as both the source and destination?

I only have one ext4 partition, and there are no folders this large on it to verify... so not me. I'll convert other partitions to ext4 some months from now, after I'm certain I can permanently stick with Linux from that day on and no longer need Windows accessing my files.