Backing Up My Ex HD Problems....


Hello,

I went to back up my music collection from a 1TB Lacie to a 500 WD, something I have done successfully several times without a hitch. However, this time the coping could not be completed because it thinks it has filled up the space on the WD HD.

I have about 290GB of music and I typically drag the Lacie "Music" folder over to the "Music" folder on the WD. I will get a message that it cannot move because there isn't enough room, so I click "replace" and that usually works. This time,the process stopped at about 30% and message comes up that says the WD is full.

How can this be? Am I missing something? Technically, the 500 GB WD has no more information on it than the Lacie does at about 290GB. Any ideas?
jb8312
Is it possible your WD library has multiple copies filling up the space?

You can always format the WD and begin again.
It seems likely that Albertporter's assessment is correct, and that you may have created multiple copies of your Music folder that are exhausting the available space on your WD drive. I'd also suggest formatting the WD and then using backup software to maintain your desired data redundancy. A free program that I use and have found to be excellent is SyncBack. It allows you to have either automatically scheduled backups of any desired directories or to just run on request, and only writes new files and folders that have been created since the last backup. Very efficient and it will prevent you from creating multiple instances of your data unless you set it up to do that intentionally. Best of luck, and let us know how it goes!
Sorry, but I just noticed in your system link that you're a Mac user. Btw, you have a very nice system! Unfortunately the SyncBack software that I linked to above is only for PCs. I'm sure you can find some similar backup software for the Mac, but I have no experience to make such a recommendation.
Can you browse into the ext drive? If so then you can see what is there and delete what is old or un necessary.