Hello All,
As the Secretary our computer group, SLO Bytes, I maintain an archive of files relating to that organization. I copy them to a 16Gb flash drive and give a copy to each member of our Board of Directors.
Over time, the archives have grown. At some point, they will be too large to fit on 16Gb flash drives. I decided to compress the content into a 9Gb .zip file.
When I tried to copy that file to a flash drive, I got an error message indicating that the file was too large to fit on the drive. It puzzled me why a 9Gb file wouldn't fit on a 16Gb flash drive. I tried various flash drives with the same results. In order to make sure that the supposedly empty drives didn't have hidden files that put me over the 16Gb limit, I reformatted them. That didn't help.
It finally occurred to me that the problem might be due to the inherent limitations of the FAT32 file format. Using the formatter built in to Windows 10 and other Windows versions, I reformatted in EXFAT and tried again to copy the large .zip file.
That solved the problem. The large .zip file copied successfully to the 16Gb flash drive when formatted in EXFAT. The EXFAT format has the advantage of being read writeable across multiple operating systems, a feature not found in some other formats.
Lesson learned
Ralph Sutter
