Okay. I KNOW this isn't exactly a sim problem. But all of you are so extremely intelligent, and so helpful! And it sort of does have to do with the sims anyway.

So I have an external hard drive that is 250GB. I currently have 98GB left. I like to make copies of my sim games just in case something goes haywire. It has saved me MANY a times. Except, my whole folder for the sims 2 is usually ball parking somewhere between 13-20GB.

So, it takes up a lot of space. I zipped the folders, and checked their size. They are about 6-7GB in size. I tried to move them into my external hard drive, and I get a message saying file is too large for the destination! But I have 98GB left of space!

I don't understand!

I'm asking this question here, since you guys know the game and it's files very intimately. All of you should be able to understand if something in the files can't be compressed or something....

Is the External HDD formatted with Fat-32? Versus NTFS?
You can search on how to convert from fat32 to ntfs without losing data. If you need help on this, let us know.

Moved to Computer Tech.

Oh! My HDD is formatted as FAT32. Does that make a difference? Is that why I can't put a compressed sims 2 folder?

I looked up how to change it to NTFS, and it seems I have to go into the command prompt. I've done things in the command prompt before, but I'm concerned over a loss of data...


Thanks for the fast reply!

FAT32 (or NTFS) is the File System, it's got nothing to do on whether the folder is a compressed folder or not. FAT32 won't be able to process files bigger than 3.25GB. That's a "hard" limit that you cannot get around.

Backup! Backup! Backup!
Done properly, there won't be loss of data. I've done it with files remaining intact. But yes, I backed up my data to 2 other HDDs, 'cos I'm just paranoid by nature (and I have all those spare HDDs (ntfs-formatted of course) from Notebooks who have served their time).

And then that became a lesson learnt when I purchase external HDDs - verify the vendor used NTFS before I dump my data on there - for next time.