Catch a thread’s exception in the caller thread?

I’m very new to Python and multithreaded programming in general. Basically, I have a script that will copy files to another location. I would like this to be placed in another thread so I can output .... to indicate that the script is still running.

The problem that I am having is that if the files cannot be copied it will throw an exception. This is OK if running in the main thread; however, having the following code does not work:

try:
    threadClass = TheThread(param1, param2, etc.)
    threadClass.start()   ##### **Exception takes place here**
except:
    print "Caught an exception"

In the thread class itself, I tried to re-throw the exception, but it does not work. I have seen people on here ask similar questions, but they all seem to be doing something more specific than what I am trying to do (and I don’t quite understand the solutions offered). I have seen people mention the usage of sys.exc_info(), however I do not know where or how to use it.

Edit: The code for the thread class is below:

class TheThread(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, sourceFolder, destFolder):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.sourceFolder = sourceFolder
        self.destFolder = destFolder
    
    def run(self):
        try:
           shul.copytree(self.sourceFolder, self.destFolder)
        except:
           raise