File Too Big for USB Drive When USB has Enough Space

While trying to copy a large file (greater than 4GB) over to a USB drive, as a backup, I ran into an issue. The file would fail to copy over to the empty USB drive claiming that it was too large for the destination file system. Yet there was plenty of available space on the USB drive.

The issue was that the USB drive was partitioned for the FAT32 file system which has a file size limit of 4GB.

 

Switching the File System on USB Drive

The solution was to convert the USB drive over to the NTFS file system.

To do this, right click on the USB drive from the File Explorer window and then select “Format…“. Within the “Format USB Drive” pop-up window select “NTFS” under the File system option and click the “Start” button to convert it. NOTE: Formatting the drive will completely erase the drive! You will want to backup any existing content on the drive prior to formatting.

After the USB drive is formatted to the NTFS file system you will be able to copy over files larger than 4GB.

 

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I welcome your thoughts, questions or suggestions on my article on getting around the issue of copying a large file over to a USB drive with plenty of space.

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