FAT Drive Truncating Files to 4GB

[NextGenSeq]

I am beginning to archive old data and have a 2TB USB FAT formatted drive for this purpose.

However, any file that is larger than 4GB is truncated to 4GB. Apparently FAT drives won't copy files larger than this.

I can compress the files and copy them but soon even the compressed data files will be larger than 4GB.

Is there an easy solution around this?

(Note I can't reformat to NTFS since the data is on a Red Hat computer and they don't support NTFS).

[Thomas Doktor]

Do you plan to use the drive on a non-linux/unix-variant system? Otherwise just format with a filesystem supported by linux, e.g. ext3.

[NextGenSeq]

Ideally it will be able to be mount on Windows computers also.

[dawe]

I am beginning to archive old data and have a 2TB USB FAT formatted drive for this purpose.

However, any file that is larger than 4GB is truncated to 4GB. Apparently FAT drives won't copy files larger than this.

I can compress the files and copy them but soon even the compressed data files will be larger than 4GB.

Is there an easy solution around this?

(Note I can't reformat to NTFS since the data is on a Red Hat computer and they don't support NTFS).

NTFS is an option, as long as you're able to run ntfs-3g on linux (which is pretty stable).
BTW, FAT capabilities are well known, to me it's a deprecated file system, absolutely unsuitable for modern data throughput. Compressing is not an option, you will lose a lot of time for a workaround.

d

[rmdavies]

You can get various drivers that claim to be able to mount or browse ext2/ext3 partitions on Windows:

http://www.ext2fsd.com/

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

http://www.chrysocome.net/virtualvolumes

Hopefully at least one of them would work for you.

Alternatively, you could use the unix 'split' command to break the big files into chunks on the FAT partition.

[NextGenSeq]

Thanks I'll look into drivers for mounting ext2/ext3 on windows.

I may be mistaken but most USB thumb drives are also FAT formatted aren't they?

I had this same problem with them.

[dawe]

I may be mistaken but most USB thumb drives are also FAT formatted aren't they?

Unfortunately yes...

[cariaso]

crossposted

http://i.seqanswers.com/question/7/fat-drive-truncating-files-to-4gb

I've offered an additional response, suggesting NTFS and FileSpanning options.

please forgive the well intentioned thread hijacking