Useful Hints & Issues with Backing Up the PS3 HDD...

[jon s]

My first PS3 died in August. I could not wait for the refurbed unit to come so I bought a new PS3. I wanted to swap the hard drive from the old unit to the new but was told it would not work as each PS3 encodes each hard drive with a unique ID number. You swap the hard drive and the PS3 will say you have to reformat it. So i lost all my trailers, games etc.

So when I bought the second unit, I also bought an external USB Seagate 250GB drive which initially did not work. The HDD was formatted NTFS and the PS3 only sees FAT32. You cannot reformat the HDD with FAT32 from Windows itself as Windows now limits FAT32 to 32GB (altho FAT32 can recognize a whopping two terabytes (2,000 GB)!!!) You will need to browse the internet and download FAT32Format. This will let you format the HDD as one partition. It is very easy to exchange the internal HDD. The screw holding the drive chassis in place is very tight so be careful you do not strip the screw head. You can use any internal 2.5" SATA drive with a spin speed of 5400rpm. You can find drives up to 250GB at CompUsa for about $169. Smaller drives are considerably less. As Sony is planning to add DVR capability sometime next year, it would be better to buy a drive as big as possible, as HD material seems to use 6GB for a two hour video using the MP4 format.

After all that, I backed up the PS3 using the built-in backup capability. Too be very frank, the back up utility sucks big time. It is very slow. And it only backs up your photos, non-copyrighted videos and audio files.

When backing up the music files, the system truncates long filenames. So if the music file has any long names in the properties tab, it will be chopped off. If you rip a CD to the PS3 which does not have any information available on the internet, you would probably have entered the info on your own for each track. Guess what. All the info is lost on the backup. In order to keep the long filenames and custom entries, you should copy the said files to the external hard drive iso using the backup function. The only drawback is you can only copy music files ONE FOLDER AT A TIME. It is tedious if you have a lot of music, but it beats re-entering all the missing info.

Backup will NOT backup any copyrighted video. This includes the movie trailers on the PlayStation Store. But you can manually select all of the videos and copy them to the external hard drive (and unlike music files, you can select all of the video files at once).

Here is a nifty trick. Normally videos will show a gray icon on the XMB bar. if you MOVE the videos from the PS3 and copy them back from the external HDD, the icons change to little rectangle boxes which shows about 10 seconds of the beginning of each clip. Real cool.

Issues which I am still have on are:
1. You cannot copy game demos from the PS3 to the HDD, even before they are installed.
2. while you can play DVD files from the external HDD (not on the PS3 itself), it will only play one file at a time. the video stops at the end of each file. You cannot have them run as one long stream.

[ps3andlovinit]

Originally Posted by jon s

You cannot reformat the HDD with FAT32 from Windows itself as Windows now limits FAT32 to 32GB (altho FAT32 can recognize a whopping two terabytes (2,000 GB)!!!) You will need to browse the internet and download FAT32Format.

Or use a Mac instead if you have one.

Originally Posted by jon s

After all that, I backed up the PS3 using the built-in backup capability. Too be very frank, the back up utility sucks big time. It is very slow.

It took just under an hour to backup 20GB for me. About 40mins or so to restore that 20GB. The difference was the slower write speed of my external 2.5 drive vs the PS3 internal drive I believe.

Originally Posted by jon s

And it only backs up your photos, non-copyrighted videos and audio files.

It also backs up your downloads from the PSN, demos and install packages from the store. Your game saves for all user accounts etc. The restore operation brought them back exactly as they were before. The restore was to the SAME machine...might get different (no?) results if it was to a different machine. So for those that have been wondering - you don't need to re-download everything over again if your upgrading a drive. Not sure if this rule applies over time - if your user accounts and content has changed since the last backup for example - maybe it would be different.

Originally Posted by jon s

When backing up the music files, the system truncates long filenames. So if the music file has any long names in the properties tab, it will be chopped off. If you rip a CD to the PS3 which does not have any information available on the internet, you would probably have entered the info on your own for each track. Guess what. All the info is lost on the backup. In order to keep the long filenames and custom entries, you should copy the said files to the external hard drive iso using the backup function.

I had copied my items manually (for other reasons) and then deleted them..so they wouldn't be included in the PS3 backup and take up time. Did the same for photos and videos as well.

Originally Posted by jon s

The only drawback is you can only copy music files ONE FOLDER AT A TIME. It is tedious if you have a lot of music, but it beats re-entering all the missing info.

You can group by All and you should be able to copy all tracks at once. I had grouped mine by Genre and copied them that way because it also happened to be the way I wanted the folders to be created on the USB drive - but I can't see why grouping by All and doing it in one operation wouldn't work. It should be fine. Thanks for the missing info bit. Good to know.

Originally Posted by jon s

Here is a nifty trick. Normally videos will show a gray icon on the XMB bar. if you MOVE the videos from the PS3 and copy them back from the external HDD, the icons change to little rectangle boxes which shows about 10 seconds of the beginning of each clip. Real cool.

You can do that anytime when watching the trailer - the triangle brings up the pop-up overlay menu and you can set where you want the 15 sec clip to start. Looks like the copy operation auto sets it to the beginning for you. Again good to know.