How is Acronis 10.0? I have that from when I added the larger drive…
It works. It backs things up to another drive. Do you have an external hard drive you can to dedicate to backups? Make sure it’s formatted NTFS.
If you don’t have your own external storage, use an online backup service.
More information is in the backups thread.
Wow, looks expensive for the online stuff.My “My Documents” folder is 17G.
Dumb question: If I can’t download more than 4G can I upload more than 4G??
The problem is with individual files that are that large, not aggregates.
Right. The restriction you’re hitting is on the biggest file size that is allowed, not the number of files.
FAT32 is a 32-bit file system. The biggest file that is allowed in a FAT32 file system is thus (2^32)-1 bytes. That is 4,294,967,295 bytes, or, 4GB minus one byte.
Or another analogy, the old FAT32 file system is like a kid who can only count to 10. You can’t give him 15 things to keep track of because he doesn’t know how to count after 10.
OK, so I can copy pretty much everything I have as long as I find a big enough drive to do so, if I pass on the online option!
We have a number of WD “My Passport” external hard drives (320 and 500 Gb). The ones that are older than a year old all appear to have been pre-formatted FAT32. I discovered this to my horror a couple of months ago after one of our clients was having problems writing very large video files to one. Check those drives!
Oh, this just reminds me of one of my pet peeves:
The Xbox 360 does not support NTFS formatted hard drives for media playback. WTF Microsoft?
Ok, I’ve made my backup. Any estimate on how long it takes to convert 250G? I’m wondering if I should let it run all night or just do it tomorrow…
It takes practically no time at all just to reformat the drive. It does take a lot of time to be very, very sure that you’ve backed everything up, have your OS install discs, and then reinstall and copy everything back over.
Pogo
31
You backed it up onto a different, NTSF drive right?
Let it run all night if the hard drive thrashing won’t bother you.
Wait, I don’t want to completely reformat the whole thing, I just want to convert it to NTSF without changing my data as the links above said I can. Is that not possible?
I made backups just in case something goes wrong. And I used a 16G thumb drive as backup for my important files.
Pogo
33
That is possible, just saying that one should be prepared for the worst.
sinfony didn’t bother reading all the actual words in this thread. you are not reformatting your drive.
From the sound of it, the fat to ntfs converter is something that will take 10 minutes max
I think it was more like I read them, forgot them, came back to the thread later and posted based on a flawed recollection. But it is still wise to make extra triple sure that you’ve really backed up everything you want.
It’s quick and pretty safe. Just don’t kick out the plug mid conversion!
Juste
37
Just remember to reboot after you convert to NTFS and let it index for a little while (typically 10 minutes) and you should be fine.
Even newer external hard drives are formatted FAT32, formatting them for NTFS is always the first thing i do when installing a new external drive, although i have forgotten on a couple of occasions and then converted afterwards with no trouble.
Nellie
38
It’s been a while since I had to use it, but my recollections of convert are not laden with tales of woe. Years ago when NTFS was new we had a installation routine that required FAT32 on the drive and once we’d copied the image we then convert to NTFS. We’re probably only talking megabytes compared to gigs of data back then, but over the thousands of computers I’ve used convert on I don’t recall one ever spazzing out over it.
Dealing with your photos though? definitely back them up, losing a disk with a standard image is an extra 20 minutes work, losing all your photos? Shudder
nKoan
39
I converted one of my drives over a little while ago. I didn’t lose anything, but you definitely want to prepare for the worst. Make a backup, just in case. Heck, you should be making backups anyway for photos (and music and anything else you don’t want to lose).
I had hard drives crash back in 2002 taking all my photos with them. I still keep them around, in hopes that one day we’ll have the technology to revive dead hard drives.
Uh, we do. But bunny suits and clean rooms are not free.
