Sherry, you would need enough space to create the compressed file so 
you're possibly looking at another external HDD. But! I'm wondering if 
you might not be able to reduce the size of what's already there. Do you 
currently make full or incremental backups? Full backups take a lot of 
space because each backup is one entire copy of your source. Incremental 
backups only add changes to the backup target. I have a 1 Tb external 
that I use to backup my wife's desktop as well as my own, plus both of 
our laptops. We have a good supply of music and a few videos and movies 
as well as the normal personal documents and loads of pictures. We've 
got great-great nieces and great grand babies so when I say we have 
pictures, we have pictures! I have four folders on the external, one for 
each computer and I put incremental backups into each folder. We have 
well over 50% free space on the external. I also reduce the size by 
filtering out file duplicates and keeping one folder marked as the 
primary backup and the other three marked for which computer they came 
from. I backup settings as well as software lists and software sources 
so that I can keep the settings and programs on the laptops from being 
changed from the high security settings I have on them. I won't go into 
detail as to how I do that because I don't use Microsoft any more. I got 
fed up with it and for years we've used Linux.
Unless your external HDD is small and you have several computers backed 
up on it, you should be able to trim things down by changing your backup 
settings and performing incremental backups, plus there are utilities 
that allow you to find and remove duplicate files if that would help.
There is of course one big caveat. There is one other reason for a false 
message of a drive being full and that is if it is physically failing. 
You should be able to use chkdisk to check the drive for physical 
errors. Here's a link to some info; 
http://www.w7forums.com/threads/how-to-use-chkdsk-check-disk.448/


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