? on backing up with an external hard drive (bks files)

[sparkyaber]

I tried to back up all of my pictures, videos, songs, etc onto an external hard drive. I started the backup proccedure and it said it would take about 13 hours to finish. I checked the computer the next morning and it had stopped after about an hour. I had an error message saying I could only back up 4MB's of information. It stated that if it was using FAT32 (what is that?)format this is what caused it to stop at 4MB's. The "file system" that is stated when I look under "properties" of the external drive is FAT32. I would like to set up some schedule that once a week all of the new pictures, songs and documents that I have saved in that week would be backed up right to the external hard drive. Is this possible, or just a pipe dream?

Thanks

Abe

[upnorth]

1st off go to windows explorer and find the drive and right click on it and go to properties it will tell you how much space you have on that drive. Could be that it wasn't formatted properly. It would also help to know what version of Windows you are using. It could be that you need to format the drive.

You can schedule back up of new files pretty easily, but you need to figure out the drive format and size out before you get to that point.

[jwhjr]

You should be able to change the file system on the external drive to NFTS which will allow more data. I think there is a smaller partition limit when using the FAT32 file system depending on the OS used. When I picked up my 250G external, it came formatted FAT32 and I changed it to NFTS to make it work for the amount of data I had. There were instructions included with it that outlined the steps to change it to NFTS. Hope this helps.

[HaywardBound]

Quote:

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You should be able to change the file system on the external drive to NFTS which will allow more data. I think there is a smaller partition limit when using the FAT32 file system depending on the OS used.

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jwhjr got it right. With FAT32 there is a 4GB file size limit and you need to change the drive to NTFS . Right click on you local drive and you will see "File System: FAT32".

Its not hard to do, and you don't have to reformat your drive. There are detailed instructions if you Google 'convert fat disks to NTFS'.

It is recommended that you back up your files before doing the conversion.

Let us know how it works.

Jon

[sparkyaber]

Spot on as always fellas! Thanks for the info. I should have know to just type it into google. Infact, the only luck that I have finding anything on google these days is when I type in anything software related, let it be a warning, error or anything related to the OS. Perfect example: I tried to find a specific programmer for my truck the other day, typed in the exact name of the product, and 3 pages later found the home page for the manufacturer. The first 3 pages were only links to web sites that were trying to sell that item to me. Anybody have a web search engine that is not solely based on comercialization?

[Valv]

Since your backup is of files you have already on your system, go the easy way and start all over.

Go to Control panel, choose Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management, then format the delete partition and re-format using NTFS (be sure to check "Quick Format" or it will take days).

Anyway the backup shouldn't take that long, I just backed up my 35gb of docs and took not much time

[jwhjr]

Thanks for the clarification on the NTFS Valv . It was getting late and apparantly my dyslexia comes out at night...

[sparkyaber]

I actually did it both ways, just for G.P. and both were successful. It only took about an hour and a half to backup over 30 GB of info.