Backup problem

[ohheckyeah]

I want to back up my C drive to my external E drive. I keep getting a message that the file is too big but I have 455GB's free on the E drive. I dont' know what the problem is. I'm using Windows XP.

[CK_John]

1. Some software that still supports W98 may have a 4GB size limit because

FAT32 files could only use 4GB file size max.

[ohheckyeah]

2. Yeah, I got a message about that but the file

was way under 4 GB. It was actually 50 MB.

[MyNameGoesHere]

3. Sometimes it's not what is being written

but to where. If you have plenty of disk space and it is choking on the copy, run a disk check on both drives. If you have plenty of space but it fails to copy several things can cause it.


1 Is the file in use?
2 Do the disks have bad sectors.
3 Is there enough contiguous free space <defrag>
4 Is the target disk formatted fat16? 2gb limit. Try using NTFS whenever possible. You can even convert disk if its not. look here. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456984.aspx


Good luck

[ProdigalJunkMail]

4. i get messages like that sometimes

when trying to move data from an NTFS partition to a FAT32 partition...is that what's happening?

sP

[CK_John]

5. Could be, going by memory Fat32 also had a partition size limit I believe of

32GB. Remember also that backup files are usually one big compressed file with various extensions as tif(Acronis true image file) or zip depending on the software.

[MyNameGoesHere]

6. Oh one more thing to check

Your temp folder. Lot of programs use it to store while copying. There are some limitations to the number of files you can have in a directory. Anything in temp can be deleted if not in use.

[ohheckyeah]

7. Thanks. I'll check that.