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I inadvertently download a file to a disk that has less space than the file itself. The whole size is around 100GB and the size on disk for now is around 40GB. I want to move the file to another disk which has enough space, but move/copy failed, telling me that I don't have enough space albeit the destination has over 1TB free space.

Both disks are NTFS, I want to keep the downloaded part and resume the download elsewhere. How can I move the file?

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    Does this answer the question: superuser.com/questions/657780/…
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Apr 14, 2021 at 16:43
  • I hate to be a bummer but you are going to spend way more time on this than it would have taken to re-download the file and ultimately, you will probably either fail or mess up your file system with tools ported from Unix.
    – Señor CMasMas
    Commented Apr 14, 2021 at 19:06
  • I would also recommend simply doing the download on the new disk and deleting from the smaller disk.
    – Charles Kenyon
    Commented Apr 14, 2021 at 19:08
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    You seem to have multiple problems. (1) You have an incomplete download. You neglect to mention how the downloaded terminated, e.g. an abort due to error or a cancellation? (2) For whatever reason you cannot "move/copy" the incomplete download to another filesystem. You neglect to provide details of what you tried, and how that failed.
    – sawdust
    Commented Apr 14, 2021 at 22:38
  • @user1686 Thanks for the great info! I'll give it a try.
    – Jamboree
    Commented Apr 15, 2021 at 6:33

2 Answers 2

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You likely need to delete the existing 40GB and restart the download to the new destination.

This depends somewhat on what tool (e.g. browser) you are using for the download, but that tool is likely to fail downloading to the new file in the new destination.

Moving the 40GB is just the first of several problems, but that can be solved by first moving or deleting some smaller files (and empty the Recycle Bin!). Windows just needs some "elbow room" on the disk, probably only a few MB.

The bigger issue is telling the download tool where the new file is; there are ways that you might manage this (symlinks, extending the filesystem volume), but the download tool could still choke on the changes.

Unless you are downloading this over dial-up, your best option is probably to start over. You have less than half of the file downloaded, and you may end up wasting the download time to get the remainder.

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  • The source disk doesn't have enough physical space to extend. I once tried moving other files and get 700MB free space but when I tried to move the target file the error still occurred and the free space soon became 0 again. The destination is another disk so I cannot use hard-link, but I think soft-link will be OK.
    – Jamboree
    Commented Apr 15, 2021 at 6:38
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(Credits to @user1686 for pointing out this thread)

Finally I'm able to use the sparse file utility to copy the file efficiently to another disk. I have no idea why Windows doesn't copy/move in the same way.

FWIW, I then deleted the file on the original disk and made a symbolic link to the new location, now the download can be resumed without errors.

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