compressing hard drive back-up

[xVinsjenTx]

I have a 1TB hard drive with all my games on it and I would like to merge it with another 1TB drive in my pc and use them as one big drive. Doing this will delete all the data on both disks which would take years to re-download I do have a spare harddrive of 250GB or so can I make a compressed back-up of one of my drives and put it onto my 250GB drive so I can merge the other two?

 

[captaincharisma]

there is no compression format that would be able to compress a 1 terabytes of data down to 250GB.. you must have a really slow internet connection if you are saying it would take a year to redownload everything.

 

[cryoburner]

I have a 1TB hard drive with all my games on it and I would like to merge it with another 1TB drive in my pc and use them as one big drive.

Why? I guess I don't understand what you hope to gain. Are you out of room for installing games on Steam or something? Steam does allow you select multiple drives to install games on, and easily move games from one drive to another. For something like video files, just make another directory to store them in on the other drive.

there is no compression format that would be able to compress a 1 terabytes of data down to 250GB.

Well, technically if it were all uncompressed data like text files and bitmaps it could happen. That's probably not the case though. : P

 

[USAFRet]

I have a 1TB hard drive with all my games on it and I would like to merge it with another 1TB drive in my pc and use them as one big drive. Doing this will delete all the data on both disks which would take years to re-download I do have a spare harddrive of 250GB or so can I make a compressed back-up of one of my drives and put it onto my 250GB drive so I can merge the other two?

The only way you could squeeze 1TB of data into a 250GB drive is if it was all txt documents.
Which is not the case.

Why "one big drive"? You're not gaining anything.

 

[xVinsjenTx]

there is no compression format that would be able to compress a 1 terabytes of data down to 250GB.. you must have a really slow internet connection if you are saying it would take a year to redownload everything.

 

[xVinsjenTx]

I have 3-4MB/S download and I could re-download everything but if there is a fast way why take the slow one

 

[failboat]

Moving programs can be complicated due to registry issues. Steam has a tutorial. It's easy on there. I'm not sure if this works with drives that have data on them. https://www.howtogeek.com/109380/how-to-use-windows-8s-storage-spaces-to-mirror-combine-drives/ if you have nothing to lose you could try the "simple space"

 

[USAFRet]

Moving programs can be complicated due to registry issues. Steam has a tutorial. It's easy on there. I'm not sure if this works with drives that have data on them. https://www.howtogeek.com/109380/how-to-use-windows-8s-storage-spaces-to-mirror-combine-drives/ if you have nothing to lose you could try the "simple space"

Moving Steam games is trivial. Built right into the client:
To move an already installed game
Games library
Right click the game
Properties
Local Files
Move Install Folder