I'm trying to backup whole the systemto an external drive with USB /and/or SATA.My C:\drive Win 7 has 39.5g used, 75g free and the destination has 80g free.It starts to create a shadow copy and about 30% later, I get a message that the drive is full backup cannot continue. Tried a different drive with 50g free and the same result.Should I report this to MS or am I doing something wrong?

just out of interest, what file system are the external drives formatted with?Gordonwww.longneckconsulting.com

Yeah, it should be NTFS formatted. Other Windows file systems are not able to handle files which are larger than 2 or 4 GB, resp.