>>>>>More fun stuff to come unless I just give up on backup and simply ditch everything and reformat the drive.
>>>>
>>>>Windows is so stupid you can't even leave it for ten minutes to move a dozen gigabytes to a thumb drive. I said move, and it went on happily to do so, and then twenty minutes later I notice it has stopped at 19% and is waiting for the permission to delete a thumbs.db, which is there for the sole use of file (nee windows) explorer. Why is that file always created, how to turn it off, and why does it have to have such a set of nasty attributes is beyond me.
>>>>
>>>>I've hit this same spot so many times that I think if it were a physical object I'd be limping from broken toes.
>>>
>>>You should use Beyond Compare for moving files. That program would just skip those it cannot move and gets the job done. In the end you only need to deal with the conflicts but it saves you a lot of wasted time.
>>
>>I'm using Total Commander, but underneath it's using some OS service and that service doesn't make any kind of check before starting, it processes the files one at a time. Actually, I could write to Ghisler himself and propose to just keep these settings in the ini file (as in "delete thumbs.db as soon as spotted, and for other files use these choices" :).
>
>I didn't know Total Commander is still alive!

Unfortunately not available for Linux, but Krusader does the job rather well (though, missing a few things - like its file viewer requiring a bunch of trips to the menu to open the file again with a different view, instead of just flipping between views with a single keypress. It's, I think, the unfortunate decision to make it an editor as well. Also, haven't tried to do ftp from it - what little of it I still need I do from TC within the VM.