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I haven’t used Hazel much for a while (the original use case went away), but I came up with a new use case... I created a folder “Archive…” (with subfolders) and a folder with the same name on an external mountable SSD drive. I created a Rule:

if <all> Kind is not Folder and Any File then Move to folder Archive (on the external drive).
if <all> Kind is Folder then Run Rules on folder contents

When the agent ran, a lot of the files were copied correctly but I also got a lot of error notifications “Move Failed” “Could not move file <filename> from folder <foldername> to folder <foldername>".

For example, there was one folder containing 36 images I scanned from film. All but three of them copied OK. For the ones that failed, Hazel had created a copy (actually multiple, one for each run on the agent) with Zero bytes on the archive disk, so I removed them and manually dragged the file to the archive disk filed, which worked without problem.

I looked in the log and the error message for the failures is:
2021-08-14 20:51:46.574 hazelworker[5251] Error moving file from /Users/stuartmcrae/Archive.../Scanned Photographs/LC21-2/LC21-2 07.jpg to /Volumes/BMW2002/Stuart's Archive/Archive.../Scanned Photographs/LC21-2/LC21-2 07-4.jpg: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=89 "Operation canceled"

I did wonder if it was an SSD write error, but then I would expect all of the files to get slowly get copied when the agent runs again, but many (all?) haven’t (but I get multiple zero byte files created).

After I encountered the error, Hazel informed me that the new version is available so I downloaded and installed that (thinking it might be a Big Sur issue). But I am still getting the problem and that is the version I used to generate the attached log.

OS X Version 11.5 (Build 20G71)
Hazel Version 5.0.7 (Build 2203)

Any ideas? Thanks.

Can you try it with a destination on the same drive and see if you get the same error?

Mr_Noodle wrote:Can you try it with a destination on the same drive and see if you get the same error?

Sure. I just modified the rule to point to a folder on the same drive. Everything was moved correctly (well, I guess there was no actual move of contents involved, but the agent completed and the files show up in the new location).

Just in case, I have since run both the vendor’s diagnostics (WD) and Apple First aid on the target SSD driver and it did not show a problem.

I’ll dig out another (spinning) external drive and try it with that as the target - I’ll let you know.

Mr_Noodle wrote:Can you try it with a destination on the same drive and see if you get the same error?

OK, I copied everything back to the original folder and then modified the agent to move the files to a folder on a different external disk. That worked fine.

So it looks like it the problem might specific to the WD My Passport SSD drive (or maybe any SSD drive). I had a quick look at the WD site but will check again…

Thanks for your help so far… (and thank you that, whatever the problem was, it didn’t lose any data!)

Is your local drive an SSD? If so, try using that as the destination. I don't think the issue is SSD specific since I and many others have used Hazel with SSDs with no issue.

Mr_Noodle wrote:Is your local drive an SSD? If so, try using that as the destination. I don't think the issue is SSD specific since I and many others have used Hazel with SSDs with no issue.

Thanks.The local drive is an SSD. I did try using It as the destination (as well of source) and that worked.

I am out today but when I get back I will try copying everything over to my other machine (also SSD), installing Hazel there, and seeing if I get the same problem.

If that doesn’t work, and if you think it could be a drive problem, then maybe I’ll try making a support request to WD as it does seem like it is only a problem with the My Passport SSD device.

Many thanks for your advice.

It does seem like an issue specific to that drive. If you have any other external SSDs to test it on, that may help confirm.

Thank you for your help.

I wondered if maybe the problem was due to the fact that the drive is synced to iCloud with storage optimisation (since a Zero Byte file is created on the destination for each file that fails to copy so maybe this are files which were not downloaded). Therefore I moved all the data to another machine without storage optimisation and reran the test. The result was the same. Out of interested, I then did it again with Copy instead of Move, with the same results.

I haven't gone through all the files in detail, but from a quick looks like exactly the same files fail to copy as on the original machine. It does seem a little unlikely that this is entirely down to a hardware problem on the destination, but I guess it could be.

So then I simply did a drag and drop of the whole folder to the external SSD drive. That copied everything over fine.

My conclusion is that, rather than spend more time on this, I will change my Archive strategy. Previously I put files to archive into a folder structure and had Hazel move them when the external drive was mounted. In future, I will simply create new folders with the new archive content and drag them to the external drive manually.

Thank you again for your assistance. I probably won't pay for the Hazel upgrade, as since i retired this is the only remaining use case (apart from Trash management that I can do another way). However, if I think of new uses in future I may license it again.

Mr_Noodle wrote:It does seem like an issue specific to that drive. If you have any other external SSDs to test it on, that may help confirm.

Sort of... the drive on my MacBook is an SSD drive and the boot drive on my iMac is an external SSD and using both of those drives as source and target does work. I do not have another external SSD drive to test.

In general, it's a bad idea to use any sort of iCloud storage optimization. I'd recommend disabling that for any folders you want to use with Hazel.