Waking up this morning I found the archive had been created is only reading about 4GB which can’t possibly be right. When I explore the archive through Stuffit Deluxe, I find only a few items, which again does not make sense so, I am now moving that arhive to the home machine in order to further investigate, and at the same time I used the stuffit command line to try again on the external drive. aigh.
I guess if I went out and bought another drive I could move everything over at once without compression and save myself some time. I did see a 120GB drive at the apple store online for $269. Seems like the cost is good and the pain is very low. May have to just swallow that later today and chalk this mission up to a loss.