If my understanding is correct, the only way to copy an application from the internal HD to an external (and back again) is to perform a complete backup and restore. What would it take to encourage Sony to consider a system update that will allow copying individual applications from the internal HD to an external. The situation many of us face is when the HD is near full, deleting an old game may be necessary in order to install a new one. The old game can always be reinstalled from disk or download but with slow internet this can some times take considerably more than 12 hours per game.
I understand that being able to copy games to an external drive could allow someone to then copy the game from the external drive to someone else's console and that would violate copywrite. But there has got to be a secure way to ID a downloaded game to the console it was downloaded to so that it couldn't be transfered to another console.
Come on Sony help us out here. Not all areas offer high speed internet and for some of us, we are limited to internet providers that throttle download speed after a monthly data limit. One game can easily exceed a data limit.