Copying between 2 external hard drives

[lightshow]

I have a large amount of files I want to copy from one external hard drive to the other.

In total it is about 90 GB of raw footage with individual files that are up to 20 GB in file size.


This is my problem. When I transfer one file to the other, it has to be stored in a Temp folder in windows xp. (I beleive it is C:\Temp or something like that). Now the hard drive C: is not big enough to temporarly store some of the large 20 GB files that I need to transfer.


Is it possible to directly send one file in one external hard drive to another external hard drive without having to send it as temp to C: on my computer?


I'm running XP Pro w/ NTFS filesystem

http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/1604/demo4xx.th.jpg (http://img369.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo4xx.jpg)

[Virtualbody1234]

What happens when you drag a file directly from External HD1 to External HD2?

[Fromagepas]

I cant think why you would need a large temp directory. I have copied 120 Gb from one external HD to another and there was nowhere near that amount of space on the internal HDD.

Surely it will just transfer the files from one drive to the other.

Granted, I didn't have individual files that big.

Another alternative would be to create a back-up using DVDs (a usefull thing anyway) then restore that to the second HDD. Don't you already have back-ups you could use?

Or if you have webspace, ftp it to that then ftp it back to the other drive.

Or set winbdows temp file onto a drive with plenty of space. that shouldn't be too hard.

Personally I like the back-up option, as it's a useful thing to have anyway.

[lightshow]

What happens when you drag a file directly from External HD1 to External HD2?

I don't remeber the exact error message but it was about not having enough free space and the delay write failed. Then it reccomended doing a disk cleanup on drive C: which made me think it had to store it temporarly on C: before it could transfer it on external drive 2.


I cant think why you would need a large temp directory. I have copied 120 Gb from one external HD to another and there was nowhere near that amount of space on the internal HDD.

That worked fine for you becuase the sum of the files was 120 GB and the individual files were somewhat small so it could move file 1 to the C: then move it to external without a problem.

But in my case, file 1 may be as big as 20 GB. So it can't do that.


Another alternative would be to create a back-up using DVDs (a usefull thing anyway) then restore that to the second HDD. Don't you already have back-ups you could use?

I thought of that as an alternative. But I'd have to create a spanning .rar archive to split up 20 GB into 4.35 GB chunks.

I wanted to avoid that, but if that's what I'd have to do.

Oh, the only downside of that is the files are raw video and I need to be able to edit them on different computers so keeping it on DVD-R would have really slow access and seek times and prob freeze up my video editing program


Or set winbdows temp file onto a drive with plenty of space. that shouldn't be too hard.


I'm going to give that a try. I have an F: drive with 20 GB free.

It may be a couple of days before I can try it though (my buddy with the other external HD is taking finals).

But I'll keep you posted.

Thanks VirtualBody and Fromagepas