I use WINDOWS XP Professional as my operating system and, for many YEARS, I have been collecting thousands of screen grabs into a vast number of folders within one main folder. I have this data stored on TWO external NTFS hard drives and they are supposed to mirror one another.

I have now discovered that my laptop with 2GB of RAM cannot open that top-level folder and won't supply right-click functionality.

The drive *is* flashing as though it is possible access could be granted if I were to wait long enough for it all to load.

However, in the past I have "learnt the hard way" that if you use long file names and have long navigation paths within Windows you can lose access to files.

Have I exceeded a maximum which means I have permanent lost all means to retrieve ANY of the data ?

I should be receiving a new Windows 7 machine with 16GB of RAM within the next week. Is there any hope that that device will help me regain access or have I lost all of the data FOREVER ?
Crikey ! I have been struggling with this all morning - and, as soon as I come here to post my problem - it has gone !

I think I was, perhaps, too impatient with the (apparently) non-responsive Folder. My Toshiba computer that these hard drives were connected to broke about three months ago and I have not used these external drives since then. I have connected them
to a different laptop today - and it was the FIRST time - so perhaps some indexing had to occur - and because that goes on in the background, I thought nothing was happening and that nothing would again.

I'd still like to know if I should be careful about file storage though.

If the details from Properties is correct I have 10.8GB of pictures as 220,478 images in 1,158 folders. Is it important for me to reorganise this or is it safe to CARRY on adding ?To be on the safe side i would split it into smaller chunks and burn it to DVD so you have a hard copy...
Note: single - layer DVD's hold approx 4 G of data so you'll have to re-organise them to your liking.