Failing to backup more than 1.5TB onto a 2TB WD MBL!

So looking for some help.

I am trying to backup 1.5TB worth of ~11 million small files (2-20KB each) from my NAS to my new 2TB WD My Book Live. Confoundingly the MBL runs out of space before the NAS has finished backing-up.

The problem seems related to the huge number of small files that I work with on my NAS. These small files seem to expand in size and effectively fill the My Book Live!

Looking a bit deeper - SSH’ing ontop the MBL and using “du” - shows that these small files are effectively occupying 64KB of space each compared with the 4KB on the NAS. So I think this has somethink to do with Drive Block Size and the fact that the disks are significantly different in set-up. And therefore small files are very inefficiently store on the My Book for my particular use.

Is there anything I can do to reconfigure the block size on the My Book. As an alternative, I could ZIP together the files and backup the result but that takes an age and means I cant easily access a subset of old files when needed.

Any help/insight much appreciated.

Thanks.

You hit the nail on the head. The datavolume blocksize is 65536 so all of those small files are gonna take more space. Your best bet is to zip, rar, 7zip them up into larger chunks like you suggest.