Using an External Hard Drive on a PS3

[monkees19]

A quick perusal of Google turned up nothing but you guys know your stuff...

My brother bought an external hard drive because his PS3's HDD filled up. It's not letting him move the files from the HDD to the external, saying it's copyrighted. It won't even let him re-download anything and store it there. Any ideas what he can do?

He is trying to use the external as an HDD, not just back everything up

[Shadow Kisuragi]

Certain games can optionally lock the files from being moved - I know we did it on NCAA Football one year due to issues with trophy unlocks. What game are you trying?

[monkees19]

He wants to move everything to it. Basically to use it as an expanded hard drive as if it was a PC. He filled up the HDD in it so he wants to add the external to beef up storage space.

[blcklblskt]

Games cannot be moved to the external, only backed up.  I believe anything else (music, videos, etc.) can be stored on the external.  I'd recommend backing up the internal to the external, and then replacing the internal with a 500gb or 1 tb.  From there you should be able to move all the back ups to the new internal.  Annoying, yes, but I'd imagine it has to do with some licensing issues.

Also, like Shadow said, some save files can only be backed up and are unmovable otherwise.  If you have a PS+ subscription, you can back your saves up to the cloud and redownload them if you install a new internal.

[techwizard]

i've tried backing up to an external hard drive and my PS3 never liked the fact that it was NTFS, it seems to only work with FAT32 from what i've read online.

[blcklblskt]

Yes, the eternal needs to be FAT32.