Best way to copy large folders to external drive?

What is the best way to transfer large folders across to external drives?
I'm trying to clean up my internal hard drive and want to copy a folder (including its sub folders) of approx 10GB of video files to an external firewire drive.
I've tried drag and drop in finder (both copy and move) and it gets stuck on a particular file and then aborts the whole process.
1. Surely it should copy everything it can, and simply not copy the problem file.
2. Is there a way I can do copy and verify, a bit like when I burn a disk so I can be sure the video files have transferred safely before I delete them from my internal drive?
Many thanks in advance for any advice.

What you are trying to do makes perfect sense to me and I have done the same prior to getting myself a Time Machine system in place.
1. Surely it should copy everything it can, and simply not copy the problem file.
The fact that it is getting stuck on a particular file suggests that there is a problem with it. Try to identify which one it is and deal with that file on it's own. It could be that there is a disk error where that file is stored.
2. Is there a way I can do copy and verify....
The copy process you are using does that implicitly as I understand it.
Chris

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Message was edited by: Steve M.

Drag and drop is fine. There's really no good reason to do it a different way.
The only file limit is if the USB stick is formatted FAT32. Then 4GB minus 1 byte is the largest file size it can hold. If you format the stick as Mac OS Extended (HFS+), there's no limit to the file size, just the capacity of the drive itself.
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