need help moving assets between hard drives, some weird, unmentioned problems.

[Greenstar]

so, I have ran into an extremely unusual error/problem while trying to port my Trainz 2019 copy from my laptop drive to an external hard drive (which has significantly more storage space than the laptop, 2 TB on the external vs 478 or so GB on the laptop).
while attempting to shift the build folder as I have seen countless others recommend, the build folder gives an error that over 500 more GB than my two TB drive has are needed to export them, despite the fact that the folder itself is less than 200 GB in size on my laptop. And when I shift things individually, they suddenly balloon in size as well, still taking up almost the entire external drive without even a quarter of the assets being shifted. is this error common? I have seen literally nobody else talk about this error despite the fact that it stims from the instructions given by folk on how to export the game onto an external drive.
I will note, I bought my copy of TRS 19 from Steam. IDK if that makes a difference or not, but I figure it is worth mentioning, as I have 34,013 assets installed currently, counting base game, DLC, third party, and DLS content. I really don't want to spend the next several weeks trying to export all the CDP files for non DLC/Base game content that i have installed just to shift it onto my drive for more space. Anyone able to help?

 

[Forester1]

Is the external drive a brand name? Was it purchased from a reputable site? There have been instances of very small drives being sold as really cheap multi-terabyte drives by scammers, and they often show up even on Amazon. That would not explain the assets ballooning is size though, I don't think.

 

[Greenstar]

Is the external drive a brand name? Was it purchased from a reputable site? There have been instances of very small drives being sold as really cheap multi-terabyte drives by scammers, and they often show up even on Amazon. That would not explain the assets ballooning is size though, I don't think.

purchased directly through Walmart in person, made sure the drive had good reviews prior

 

[pdkoester]

Is the drive on the laptop compressed, or some other kind of file compression is enabled?

 

[wilts747]

Your space issue could be just in the way your respective drives are formatted. Drive space is divided up into blocks (sectors) and can vary on the type of storage and chosen format. eFAT for example can be between 4KB and 128KB subject to drive size. Trainz has loads of small files but each will still take up the whole, or multiple blocks when saved i.e. a 5KB file could take up 2x 4KB blocks or 1x 64KB block. If the file gets larger it expands into the free space and uses more blocks if necessary so its not wasted but can only be used by that file. If your computer drive has for example 4KB blocks and your storage drive larger size blocks back up space may well start to explode. There is a default block size when formatting drives which most leave alone because it tends to work out OK but if you want to tweak things it is suggested to go for small block size when loads of small files are involved and optimize upwards as the file size increases.

Instead of copy large quantities of files between 'A' and 'B' which tends to takes forever you may care to consider syncing files instead and just letting the computer get on with it. The likes of FreeFileSync for example among many other programs will do just that. They enable you for example to sync individual or multiple files or folder and even complete drives, and more important then compare them to ensure you have everything. Peter

 

[JCitron]

Losing 1.5 TB of hard drive doesn't make sense unless there's something seriously wrong with the hard disk. Right-click on your new drive and choose properties. You'll see a pie chart showing how big the drive is and how much is used.

If the drive size is far less than your 2 TB drive you purchased, you got scammed and you should contact Walmart immediately and ask for a refund.

 

[Greenstar]

Losing 1.5 TB of hard drive doesn't make sense unless there's something seriously wrong with the hard disk. Right-click on your new drive and choose properties. You'll see a pie chart showing how big the drive is and how much is used.

If the drive size is far less than your 2 TB drive you purchased, you got scammed and you should contact Walmart immediately and ask for a refund.

i can tell you the problem is solely with Trainz. I gave it a test by offloading large video files onto it during a multi-hour recording session last night.

 

[Greenstar]

Your space issue could be just in the way your respective drives are formatted. Drive space is divided up into blocks (sectors) and can vary on the type of storage and chosen format. eFAT for example can be between 4KB and 128KB subject to drive size. Trainz has loads of small files but each will still take up the whole, or multiple blocks when saved i.e. a 5KB file could take up 2x 4KB blocks or 1x 64KB block. If the file gets larger it expands into the free space and uses more blocks if necessary so its not wasted but can only be used by that file. If your computer drive has for example 4KB blocks and your storage drive larger size blocks back up space may well start to explode. There is a default block size when formatting drives which most leave alone because it tends to work out OK but if you want to tweak things it is suggested to go for small block size when loads of small files are involved and optimize upwards as the file size increases.

Instead of copy large quantities of files between 'A' and 'B' which tends to takes forever you may care to consider syncing files instead and just letting the computer get on with it. The likes of FreeFileSync for example among many other programs will do just that. They enable you for example to sync individual or multiple files or folder and even complete drives, and more important then compare them to ensure you have everything. Peter

this might be it. since I usually also put large video files onto it, i made the file chunks larger to accommodate them, as I have learned in the past that leaving the defaults won't allow few gigabyte video files to upload to drives.

 

[Greenstar]

Your space issue could be just in the way your respective drives are formatted. Drive space is divided up into blocks (sectors) and can vary on the type of storage and chosen format. eFAT for example can be between 4KB and 128KB subject to drive size. Trainz has loads of small files but each will still take up the whole, or multiple blocks when saved i.e. a 5KB file could take up 2x 4KB blocks or 1x 64KB block. If the file gets larger it expands into the free space and uses more blocks if necessary so its not wasted but can only be used by that file. If your computer drive has for example 4KB blocks and your storage drive larger size blocks back up space may well start to explode. There is a default block size when formatting drives which most leave alone because it tends to work out OK but if you want to tweak things it is suggested to go for small block size when loads of small files are involved and optimize upwards as the file size increases.

Instead of copy large quantities of files between 'A' and 'B' which tends to takes forever you may care to consider syncing files instead and just letting the computer get on with it. The likes of FreeFileSync for example among many other programs will do just that. They enable you for example to sync individual or multiple files or folder and even complete drives, and more important then compare them to ensure you have everything. Peter

checking under file properties for some of my items already in the drive, it is deffo file formatting issues.

 

[Greenstar]

CHANGING THE FILE FORMAT WORKED! THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH FOR YOUR HELP! SORRY FOR ALL CAPS, I AM JUST TOO HAPPY RIGHT NOW!

 

[JCitron]

CHANGING THE FILE FORMAT WORKED! THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH FOR YOUR HELP! SORRY FOR ALL CAPS, I AM JUST TOO HAPPY RIGHT NOW!

You shouldn't have to do that. I suppose it's the cheap drive you got from Walmart that is really the issue. If you used a name brand such as Western Digital or Seagate you could just plug-and-go.

 

[Greenstar]

You shouldn't have to do that. I suppose it's the cheap drive you got from Walmart that is really the issue. If you used a name brand such as Western Digital or Seagate you could just plug-and-go.

mine is Seagate, i formatted it based on advice i had heard with smaller flashdrives to set it to the largest block setting avaliable for video reasons. I put it to the same as my current flashdrives that work well and the problems stopped
I say "cheap" cause it wasn't 125+ USD

 

[JCitron]

mine is Seagate, i formatted it based on advice i had heard with smaller flashdrives to set it to the largest block setting avaliable for video reasons. I put it to the same as my current flashdrives that work well and the problems stopped
I say "cheap" cause it wasn't 125+ USD

Okay, that makes sense. I use spinner drives for external devices due to their size. 8TB flash drives are not cheap by any means.

Plan on doing frequent backups of that device because flash devices wear out and Trainz does a lot of writing to the disk. It's the writing that wears down the devices.

 

[Greenstar]

Okay, that makes sense. I use spinner drives for external devices due to their size. 8TB flash drives are not cheap by any means.

Plan on doing frequent backups of that device because flash devices wear out and Trainz does a lot of writing to the disk. It's the writing that wears down the devices.

I backup stuff frequently, and have an entire archive saved of assets and routes that i've worked on or downloaded from the DLS

 

[rwk]

If the drive is formatted as exFAT, then you can't write or move files larger than a certain size. It needs to be formatted as NTFS before you write anything to it as formatting wipes the disk to prepare it for new data. The old data if anything is on it is simply inaccessible and is overwritten if new data is written but you can use software to recover formatted data but it must be done before writing new data.

 

[Greenstar]

If the drive is formatted as exFAT, then you can't write or move files larger than a certain size. It needs to be formatted as NTFS before you write anything to it as formatting wipes the disk to prepare it for new data. The old data if anything is on it is simply inaccessible and is overwritten if new data is written but you can use software to recover formatted data but it must be done before writing new data.

Fair, i've since resolved the problem thankfully, things work excellently now