Question Backing up files

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MrTovi

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Feb 23, 2015
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I'm currently helping someone copy over pictures, videos, documents. They don't really care about making a image backup since they already bought a new computer. I started out by just copying and pasting everything. I realized that it would take a while to do that, so I chose to do a backup instead to make sure that I got everything copied over to their external drive. The weird thing is that their PC has a total of 5 TB, one drive is 4 TB and the other is 1 TB. When I tried to copy over the C drive, which shows as 223 GB, it says that the total size would end up being 24 TB. I looked into the files more and I noticed that the Users folder is somehow 24 TB in size but only 162 GB on the disk.

The next thing I did was go to the Desktop and I put all the files on one side and moved shortcuts to the other. I highlighted all of the files I wanted to copy and paste on the external drive and I saw that the size was also 24 TB, while size on disk is only 11.6 GB. From there I highlighted row by row, looking at the properties, to see which folders were the problem. I narrowed it down to 3 folders on the Desktop that are compressed and take up a lot of space, more than what their PC has. 1 folder size is 7.88 TB, while only 60.0 KB size on disk. The other is 15.4 TB, while only 116 KB size on disk. The last one is 740 GB, while only 574 MB size on disk. I looked into the folders and it's only about 30 - 40 pictures and videos in each folder that are somehow taking up that space. They're all compressed images and videos and only some of them seem to work. For now I'm just copying everything else over except for those 3 folders.

Any ideas as to what is happening?
 
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USAFRet said:
"24 TB"?

What tool are you using to do this "backup?

Blow all this backup stuff away...forget it... and just copy/paste whatever files the user needs.
Click to expand...
I was using Files History to backup. Yeah, currently just copying the important stuff. I'll just have to ask them if they have all those images and videos saved somewhere else.
 
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The issues with hard links to folders

Inside Windows system folders, you'll typically find those hard links (I think that is the correct term) that act like a folder, but in reality it points to another folder in the file system, but from the users perspective it looks like you dig very deep down in the file structure.

So if you choose some file copy tool not known to be useful for backup, it will go back and forth and copy same file many times over because of all those hard links that just points you all around the folder structure.
So, if you just use a "dumb" file copy tool that just follow every hard links blindly, then this happens.

You probably want to get hand in a proper tool that can create a proper disk image of the storage device where windows are installed onto.

Other

I'd also suspect errors on the file system. You may want to get Windows to check the storage device, but then again you want to create a backup first (because if the disk is already soon to die, you don't want to run a long lasting process that stressing the storage device more than necessary).
Therefore, you may need to copy files in many small steps and wait to copy the big and possible corrupted file to after, when you know the other data is safe.
 
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Grobe said:
The issues with hard links to folders

Inside Windows system folders, you'll typically find those hard links (I think that is the correct term) that act like a folder, but in reality it points to another folder in the file system, but from the users perspective it looks like you dig very deep down in the file structure.

So if you choose some file copy tool not known to be useful for backup, it will go back and forth and copy same file many times over because of all those hard links that just points you all around the folder structure.
So, if you just use a "dumb" file copy tool that just follow every hard links blindly, then this happens.

You probably want to get hand in a proper tool that can create a proper disk image of the storage device where windows are installed onto.

Other

I'd also suspect errors on the file system. You may want to get Windows to check the storage device, but then again you want to create a backup first (because if the disk is already soon to die, you don't want to run a long lasting process that stressing the storage device more than necessary).
Therefore, you may need to copy files in many small steps and wait to copy the big and possible corrupted file to after, when you know the other data is safe.
Click to expand...
Ok, I will try that out. Thank you.
 
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