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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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jholman Offline OP
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Since all hard drives may eventually fail, I thought I'd copy everything on PG's 160 GB UltraPakPlus hard drive onto another USB drive, so I could tuck the drive PG just sold me safely away and use the copy. To be the copy, I chose the USB drive PG had sold me with BIAB windows 2009; I kept its NTFS file system, did a quick format, then did a "select all" on the new drive and dragged its files over to the copy.

Well, it didn’t work. I got a warning that the new PG disk contains some invisible files, so I went into the control panel folders settings, and told it to make all files on PG's drive visible. I tried again to select all, then click and drag everything to the other hard drive, but it still didn’t work -- some files copied, but some didn't.

Do I need to do something else here -- if I want to get everything copied and have the copy work exactly like the original? I am aware that there are products like Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, Clonezilla and others designed to do this job. Do I need such a solution?

These are admittedly basic questions, but I'm more familiar with the Mac world, where I would probably use a product called SuperDuper to clone a Mac drive. In fact, I'm actually using PG's Hard Drive and attempting to make a copy in Windows XP, running on an Intel Mac via VM Ware's Fusion -- but I have no reason to believe things shouldn't work in the same way as they would with Windows XP running on a "true" PC. (The Mac OS actually can't write to or even format NTFS, but it can if its running Windows XP in a virtual environment.)

Advice? (I presume that making a backup, my only intention here, is within PG's license agreement.)

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I did exactly what you are trying to do - use the previous versions hard drive for a backup copy. I'm fully in a PC, not a Mac, and no problems just copying over. As I recall, Macs put a couple of hidden folders on their drives and folders (Resource and Fork or something along those lines) and maybe they are not allowing you to delete them even though you are running in a virtual PC mode. Even at that, I don't know why they would prevent you from copying them over. Maybe you can copy all of the PG files from the 2010 hard drive to the Mac drive, and then back to the backup usb drive. Might be something to do with usb power issues.
Good luck.

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You would just copy the files, using Explorer. There is nothing special, it is just folders and files.
The BB folder has most of the files, drag that one first.


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Peter Gannon
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I copied one folder at a time to another drive for back-up without issues.

Cheers,
Mike


Cheers,
Mike

My Music * Asus ROG Strix G15CF 32 GB DDR4 4TB HDD + 1 TB SSD NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 8GB Win 11 AKAI EIE PRO Sound Interface. BIAB/RB 2024 UltraPak Build - Latest
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It's Christmas (greetings to all), and so finally I was able to retrieve my 2010 upgrade from under the tree. Following what was helpfully described here, for backup purposes, I did a quick format of my "old" 2009.5 usb drive and copied over the folders and files from my new 2010 usb drive. But while per Properties (Windows XP) the capacity of both drives matches at 160,039,239,680 bytes, they differ in Used space (old is 90,252,083,200 bytes vs. new 90,299,580,416 bytes), and therefore also in Free space (old is 69,787,156,480 bytes vs. new 69,739,659,264 bytes). But on a main subdirectory basis, the 4 main subdirectories match in folder number and size, and the root individual files do as well. Any idea what may causing what appers to be a significant difference at the drive level? Anyone else who has done this notice this discrepancy? What would be on the new drive that would not be on the old after copying? And does any of this have any practical effect? Thanks.


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Could just be the rounding up of half full sectors, etc. after the reformat.

If you check around, lots of people complain about that when they purchase a new drive and find out that their 320gb drive doesn't seem to really have 320gb listed as free space.

Some of your drive area may not be actually full of data but there ya go.

You could try a defrag on the drive and then compare, but I doubt it will change all that much.


--Mac

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