I inadvertently download a file to a disk that has less space than the file itself. The whole size is around 100GB and the size on disk for now is around 40GB. I want to move the file to another disk which has enough space, but move/copy failed, telling me that I don't have enough space albeit the destination has over 1TB free space.
Both disks are NTFS, I want to keep the downloaded part and resume the download elsewhere. How can I move the file?
You likely need to delete the existing 40GB and restart the download to the new destination.
This depends somewhat on what tool (e.g. browser) you are using for the download, but that tool is likely to fail downloading to the new file in the new destination.
Moving the 40GB is just the first of several problems, but that can be solved by first moving or deleting some smaller files (and empty the Recycle Bin!). Windows just needs some "elbow room" on the disk, probably only a few MB.
The bigger issue is telling the download tool where the new file is; there are ways that you might manage this (symlinks, extending the filesystem volume), but the download tool could still choke on the changes.
Unless you are downloading this over dial-up, your best option is probably to start over. You have less than half of the file downloaded, and you may end up wasting the download time to get the remainder.
(Credits to @user1686 for pointing out this thread)
Finally I'm able to use the sparse file utility to copy the file efficiently to another disk. I have no idea why Windows doesn't copy/move in the same way.
FWIW, I then deleted the file on the original disk and made a symbolic link to the new location, now the download can be resumed without errors.
