Backing-Up

[DaveVikingPE]

General question:

Should I have a reasonable expectation that I can drag and drop a 24 GB file into a 40 GB hard drive?

More information: the 40 GB HD actually has 33 GB of free space.

I get a message that the 40 GB HD doesn't have enough room. I've encountered this problem in the past, with another backup HD. In that case, I was trying to use a back up program called Silver Lining to back up my 30 GB of "stuff" onto a 250 GB hard drive. Silver Lining just wouldn't do it. The 250 GB hard drive just didn't have enough free space. I don't understand how this is possible since the 250 GB HD was empty. What I ended up doing was scrapping the idea of using back up software (there went the reasonable expectation that the program would function as advertised) and simply dragged and dropped my folders into the backup device.

I really would've preferred an automated backup routine, but, alas, they don't seem to be all they're cut out to be.

My last effort began with using the Windows XP backup utility. It seemed to be just the thing I needed: drag and drop everything into the backup wizard and... and... oops, the backup wizard only handles files up to 5 GB in size. So, I ended up making lots of little backup files. That was a pain to manage.

Any ideas, thoughts, etc. are welcome.

 

[trainguy]

You might try rightclick - copy and rightclick - paste instead of drag'n'drop. In some cases (i.e. when extracting zip files by D'n'D), a large temporary file is created, whereas it wouldn't be with the rightclick method.

I know it sounds strange, but I have seen this.

Hope this works...

tg