When I use the Help and Support resource on my Toshiba laptop to run the backup utility for the entire hard disk, with about 30 GB of files, it copies only about 4 GB to my Memorex USB flash drive, then says that the media[sic] is full and asks for another media to be supplied. Direct checking shows about 57 GB free and available.
I suppose that it could be either the backup utility or the flash drive that is causing this problem.
I don't see any option for the utility to change any limit on the size of the system being backed up, and I haven't found any quick and easy way to ask the Memorex manufacturer for advice at their website "PNY.com".
I looked for an alternative freeware backup utility and did not find one of reasonable size, I could download in one or two hours using my slooow AOL dial-up internet service.
Thanks to PHUCLV for the response to my initial request for help.
The comment about the FAT32 file system was very helpful in explaining why I couldn't backup the whole hard disk, but trying to make the necessary change to the flash drive file system was frustrating, since it seems to be the case that the file system on this Memorex flash drive is fixed and unchangeable, at least so far as I could determine from the Properties tab and the PNY.COM website.
With the advantages of the NTFS system so great, I find it hard to believe that the product would be designed to be limited to the inferior FAT32 system. Since I could not get any help from the PNY.COM website, I can only hope that someone can suggest a way to change the file system given that the Policies tab in the flash drive's Properties window does not give a choice.
After doing the obvious search, I learned how to reformat my flash drive so I no longer have a four GB file size limit to stop the backup. Unfortunately, this just yields another problem: backing up over 30 GB on my hard disk seems to take forever. I have tried two backup programs, and had to interrupt them both to use the computer for more urgent tasks. In each case, the estimated time remaining was three or four DAYS. I understand that 30 GB is a lot of data, but the read of the hard disk and write to the flash drive ought to be much quicker. The first time, I tried to backup using the data compression option. After seeing how slowly the backup was going, I restarted using the raw data option. If it was in fact faster, it still gave the estimated time remaining as several days when only about 25 % of the data had been copied.
Am I missing some option that could reduce the backup time to something more convenient, like overnight, perhaps?
