Why does the copy dialog give me the incorrect total size of the files being copied?

Raymond Chen

If you try to copy a bunch of files to a drive that doesn’t have enough available space, you get an error message like this:

“But wait,” you say. “I’m only copying 5GB of data. Why does it say Total size: 14.9 GB?”

This is a case of information being presented out of context and resulting in mass confusion.

Suppose you saw the information like this:

In this presentation, it is clear that Total size refers to the total size of the drive itself.

So the original dialog is not saying that the total size of data being copied is 14.49 GB. It’s trying to say that the total size of the removable disk is 14.9 GB.

Mind you, the presentation is very confusing since the information about the removable disk is presented without any introductory text. It’s just plopped there on the dialog without so much as a hello.

I’m not sure how I would fix this. Maybe reordering the text elements would help.

However, the design of the dialog may not allow the information tile to be inserted into the middle of the paragraph. It might be restricted to a layout where you can have text, followed by an information tile, followed by buttons. In that case, maybe it could go

But like I said, I’m not sure about this.

Raymond Chen

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