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I have a 5TB external drive (WD My Passport, lets call it drive E:) and I want to move all the data to another identical drive (5TB WD My Passport, lets call it drive F:) because my first drive starts misbehaving (sometimes is so slow that it freezes my windows explorer and I am afraid it will fail soon). My E: drive has 588GB free and my F is of the exact same type and is totally empty. I even formatted it before using it. Both drives are NTFS formatted.

The first time I ran robocopy the task did not finish because the destination drive (F:) ran out of space despite the fact that the source has 588GB of free space. I reformatted my F: drive and started robocopy again. I see now that my destination drive has left with only 265GB free and robocopy is still running. I suspect soon my F: drive will run out of space once again

Does anyone know what is happening? How come I fill up my drive when I should end up with at least 588GB free? This is the command I am using:

robocopy E:\ F:\ *.* /E /COPYALL /XD "E:\path\to\folder_1" /XD "E:\path\to\folder_2" /XD "E:\path\tp\folder_3" /TEE /LOG:robocopy.log

I am using windows 10

I forgot to mention that in both cases I had to stop and restart robocopy. If I understand well that will just resume the job.

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  • If it does indeed run out of space once again, maybe try it again added the /XJ switch which will exclude NTFS junction points (robocopy might be copying the junction Points destination files as files.)
    – Yisroel Tech
    Commented Jan 18, 2023 at 19:31
  • you could use a tool like wiztree to compare which folders are oversized, and by how much
    – Cpt.Whale
    Commented Jan 18, 2023 at 20:35
  • Your disk is probably failing, so save your most important data. As a check, you could run chkdsk E: to see if there are file-system errors. Don't run chkdsk /f E: because this can destroy the data.
    – harrymc
    Commented Jan 18, 2023 at 20:39
  • Be sure the allocation unit size is the same in the new drive as in the old -- if larger, small files will take up more space on the disk.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jan 18, 2023 at 20:59
  • It's likely due to different allocation sizes. Easiest way to check is to right click the disk, click Format, and you can see the allocation unit size.
    – derelict
    Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 16:10

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