Back up compressed size questions...

alison74

Hello

My daily problem today is this.............

I have backed up my C and D drives (have partitioned comp, music etc is on D drive) to my spanking new external hard drive.

It has compressed all my files........... what does this mean ? As the amount that I backed up on my was 36GB and the amount on my new external hard drive is 36gb - so what has been compressed ?

Same for Outlook express, just backed up my messages after looking on another thread here. It took seconds and is a total of 10mb or thereabouts. But the messages I backed up are from my hotmail account which equates to 360mb

Also........... when checking these files on the 'new drive' how do you do that ? They only ever give me an option to restore.

Is there anyway to check that I have the actual emails ?

Thanks in advance

Chippy_Minton

Humm, not sure why the sizes are the same despite compression. Look at the 'Size' property of the original and backup folders, not the 'Size on disk' which may well be the same.

The backup process verifies (compares) the files after backing up and will display a message if any differences are detected.

If you want to compare files afterwards, restore the backup to a different folder and compare to the original using something like WinDiff, available from http://www.petri.co.il/download_free_reskit_tools.htm.

The WinDiff method will also work for OE .dbx files. To actually see the emails, create a new Identity and restore the backed up .dbx files to its Store Folder.