Backup PSE Organizer failed due to FAT32 limitation of external hard drive

[WimO]

I upgraded recently from PSE 10 to PSE 2020. After upgrade I put face recognition on and my new computer (Win10 Pro) did the recognition job. After completion I tried to make a backup to an external disk drive (2T). But the back-up failed with error message:

‘Error encountered while writing files. C:\.....\My Catalog 1 1\FaceAnalyses\json\113233.json’

When I tried to delete the incomplete backup-folder on the back-up drive it appeared to be not possible. Windows error: ‘An unexpected error is keeping you from deleting……. Error 0x80070052’. Now I had the unpleasant situation that I could neither create or delete files anymore to my external hard drive (and that also contained other back-up data).

I found out that the root cause was that on a FAT32 formatted drive the maximum number of files in a single folder is limiedt to 65,534 and PSE Organizer backup wanted to created apparently more. Turning on the face recognition had resulted in many additional files.

To solve this I bought another external drive (1 Tb Samsung T5 SSD) and formatted this drive to NTFS (max nr of files in a single folder now: 4,294,967,295). After that I made again a back-up of PSE 2020 without any problem. I reformatted my old external back-up drive also to NTFS (after save guarding other files) and that can also be used again.

Although the root cause is in the Windows FAT32 system I thought is would be useful to share it here as I expect that more PSE Organizer users can encounter the same issue

[Greg_S.]

Thanks for sharing.  I am curious about why you were unable to delete files from the FAT 32 drive.  Is it possible that the files were locked or in use by some other process?  Did you try to delete the files after rebooting your computer?

[WimO]

Rebooting the computer and stop/restart the external drive had no effect. Also when I connected the external drive to another computer it came up with the same error when I tried to delete files from that computer: An unexpected error is keeping you from deleting……. Error 0x80070052’. That has surprised me also.I searched the internet for some repair tool but couldn't find something.