USB file transfer

[waggythegeek]

I have an old computer that I am moving ask the files to a laptop. It's only 50 GB, so I am trying to for all if it on to a64gb USB. However, when I copied everything from the hard drive to the USB, only 5gb of stuff showed up. How do I transfer everything?

[Sauron]

Which data exactly do you want to save? I doubt you want to copy the whole windows installation. If you do however, you need to clone the partition or make a backup file (the latter will require you to restore the installation to something).

[waggythegeek]

I just want to save all files that aren't programs... No need to back up excel...

[waggythegeek]

I don't need the computer any more, just want to save old word docs and stuff

[LogicalDrm]

Maybe there is some size limit on transfer. You could try doing it on bits. Or just select the files you want to keep.

[vembutech]

Hi,

 

The capacity of your external flash drive is large: 8GB, 16GB, or more. There is enough free space on the drive. You can copy the smaller files to the external drive just fine. Yet, when you attempt to copy a large file (4GB or larger) to the external drive, Windows gives you an error (such as: There is not enough free space on the drive, or similar.) Does this sound familiar?

 

If you experience such a problem, most probably it’s caused by the fact that your flash drive is formatted with the FAT32 file system. This type of a file system has a built-in limitation on the size of the files that it may contain. Although the total size of the files that you can copy to a FAT32 drive could be as large as 2TB (or the physical capacity of the drive, whichever is smaller), the size of each individual file may not exceed 4GB.

 

In-order to solve this issue, you need to replace the FAT32 file system on the drive with the NTFS File system. The latter does not have the 4GB file size limitation, and it also allows for many other functions not supported by FAT32: file security, encryption, compression, etc.