Yup it was harder then I thought, at first I did it with windows and it formatted to exfat, then I realized exfat wasn't going to work so I went looking for a free program to convert 1 TB, took a while but I eventually did.

Also I have game files saved on the PS3 thats about 4.5 GB+ but I read that FAT32 wont save files over 4GB? that right?

lol just looked at the PS3 says 10 hours remaining....wow

When I backed up my PS3, it was 113GB, and it had 35 files that were 3.99 GB each. So... I guess that's what it does

How long did it take, I have about 140GB on my PS3 and it's going to take over 9 hours to copy @_@

I don't know about those limits. I just knew that you had to do something special to get extended fat size of 32 gigs and I didn't want to download anything on my pc so I used my brother's mac instead because I guess they hve the program already on it out of the box to do all these fanciy conversions. Yep, it will take a while. Be sure to check on it periodically. Mine shut off prematurely because I had a corrupted file.

Alright I'll keep yas updated

It took about 3 hours on my PS3 Slim.

I used USB 3.0 external drive, but the PS3 doesn't have USB 3.0, so it should only transfer at USB 2.0 speeds

Ok, I got the external formatted to FAT32, got the backup back on my external, and tried to restore. But, alas, I got the same message as before: There is no backup data. blah blah blah. But i know there is because I just put it there. poop. I guess I'll have to download everything again from PSN

As long as saves are safe, everything is good. Just annoying.

Do I have do deactivate my PS3 from the Playstation store before I restore from the backup? Is that why it isn't working? still looking for a solution lol

I don't think so. Your ps3 remembers what ps3 it is despite the hard drive change.