I have an Outlook .pst file that I am trying to move from my hard drive to an external Western Digital hard drive. The .pst file is about 5.7GB. The external hard drive has about 300GB free on it. But every time I try to move it over I get an error saying:
"Cannot copy [my filename]: There is not enough free disk space.
Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again.
To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click Disk Cleanup."
There are buttons for Disk Cleanup and OK. Obviously there is plenty of disk space available. Can Windows just not move individual files after they get beyond a certain size? Any way around this?
I tried this with a different external hard drive that had about 20GB free and it gave the same error so it seems there is something with the file and not the hard drives…
Please help!
Oh, and the computer does not have a DVD burner, so I can’t back it up that way.
That is going to be rough on the computer unless you use other tools. A backup program should be able to do it. I use Corbian Backup for things like that. It is free and pretty easy to use.
I imagine your problem is that the external drive is formatted as fat32, with its 4GB limitation on individual files (as you guessed at). Convert it to NTFS and you should be able to copy the file over.
Is the external drive formatted as FAT32 or NTFS? FAT32 has a size limit of 4GB for files, and I believe your error message is the one it gives for larger files. If this is the case, one option is to break up your file into smaller pieces. There are a bunch of tools that can do this. IIRC there’s one called something like “fragger” which I’ve used before, and tools like WinZip or WinRar should have similar functions as well.
If you’ve got a zipper like WinZip or PKZip, you’ll be able to shrink that file to probably a tenth of its original size. The exact ratio depends on the mix of attachments vs text - pure text emails will compress like crazy.
And, a 5.7 GB .pst file? You’re lucky that thing hasn’t exploded by now. Last I looked, Microsoft recommends they be no larger than 2 GB, and in practical terms, once you’re much beyond 100-200 meg, your chances of repairing one when its internal structure breaks are severely reduced.
I wouldnt have a PST that big it can cause problems i would split it up into 2 differnt ones.
I would create multiple pst files and shuffle some of your larger folders off into them. Breaking it up so you have files about a gig in size should make it more manageable.
First though, right click on the root folder in the folder list panel and open properties. Hit the advanced button and then click “compact now”.
Uber-first. Make a backup on the drive it lives on if you have enough room.