Second issue: why does a copy operation take up more space?

I have two identical Seagate Barracuda 2 TB drives (1.81 TB usable space). One is failing, so I am trying to get the data off of it onto the other. However, when i try just a simple copy and paste, or move operation, the data winds up being around 2009 GB. What gives? Is there any way to get around this issue? I've tried RichCopy, FastCopy, Windows Backup & Restore, Acronis Disk Director to clone the disk - nothing works. The cloning fails chkdsk I assume because of the failure of the source drive. Help?

Is it possible you have some hardlinks that are confusing windows?

I'm currently trying copying in smaller bits and to different drives before then copying to the replacement drive. I don't know about any hardlinks?

Is by any chance any disk formated in FAT32? With such a large drive, cluster size effect on tons of small files will cause a big waste of space, no matter of how do you copy them. If so, try reformatting in NTFS.

There was no data on the second drive, it is a replacement and empty. Both are NTFS. Cloning the drive failed, presumably due to bad clusters on the original drive. I did a chkdsk /f /r on the original drive which ran out of space during the process and failed with an error. I am attempting to copy the folder in which the failure occurred to the new drive and doing a chkdsk on it to see if it will clean up the clusters.

Alejandro85 said:

Is by any chance any disk formated in FAT32? With such a large drive, cluster size effect on tons of small files will cause a big waste of space, no matter of how do you copy them. If so, try reformatting in NTFS.

Check the cluster size on new drive. If not the same, i.e. larger on new driive, small files WILL chew up more space. Also, I did a test..... I took a large folder, copied it to my desktop, changed properties to compress folder and all sub dirs. Then, moved it to my external drive. Original on desktop was 1.07GB and .76GB compressed, but when I moved it to external, it created it as UN-compressed and orig size of 1.07GB. Do you have any compressed folder/files you are trying to clone? Could be an answer....

Tomcat...

Cluster size was the same, but yes, apparently compression was on. Thank you, I never would have thought to look for that! Solved!