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I'm trying to backup my VirtualBox, but when I try to copy the .VirtualBox directory to my external hard drive I get an "File too large" error:

[130 amanda@luna ~]$ cp -r .VirtualBox /media/LACIE/Luna/Jun012011/VirtualBox
cp: writing `/media/LACIE/Luna/Jun012011/VirtualBox/Machines/Astro/Snapshots/{9fe69a30-d308-4754-b4e4-928eb90f93d2}.vdi': File too large
cp: writing `/media/LACIE/Luna/Jun012011/VirtualBox/HardDisks/Astro.vdi': File too large

[1 amanda@luna ~]$ ls -alh .VirtualBox/HardDisks/Astro.vdi 
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda 5.0G 2010-04-30 17:41 .VirtualBox/HardDisks/Astro.vdi

What should I be looking for here?

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2 Answers 2

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56

/media/LACIE sounds like you're handling a pre-formatted drive, most likely with the FAT32 filesystem. According to Wikipedia, the maximum file size for FAT32 is about 4GB.

I suggest to reformat the drive to either ext4 (for supporting Linux file permissions) or NTFS (if you need to share the drive with windows users).

How funny, but you've now to backup your backup first before reformatting ;)

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  • Get a load of that. Sure enough, 'tis FAT. I actually added an ext3 partition at some point (probably b/c I was having the same problem last time I backed anything up, which was a very long time ago) so I can work around the FAT drive.
    – Amanda
    Jun 1, 2011 at 18:08
  • ext2 is also an option for Windows interop, but NTFS is the easiest since most modern Linux/BSD distros and Mac OS include the ability to at least read NTFS partitions out of the box. You can leave read/write drivers on the hard drive to install on other systems. Using ext2, ExFAT, HFS, or any other FS requires getting drivers onto other systems via some other method just to read the drive.
    – afrazier
    Jun 1, 2011 at 18:12
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If you need to keep the fat32 filesytem there is a way around the limit.

There is a command called split that will let you split an archive into smaller parts.

 -b, --bytes=SIZE
              put SIZE bytes per output file

Example:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=150 >test

150+0 records in
150+0 records out
157286400 bytes (157 MB) copied, 0.439344 s, 358 MB/s

split test -b 10000000

ls -l
 157286400 2011-06-01 21:18 test
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xaa
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xab
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xac
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xad
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xae
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xaf
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xag
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xah
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xai
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xaj
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xak
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xal
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xam
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xan
  10000000 2011-06-01 21:20 xao
   7286400 2011-06-01 21:20 xap

Oh and cat puts them back together.

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  • join has another use, you mean cat?
    – enzotib
    Jun 1, 2011 at 19:41
  • @enzotib indeed :-D
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 1, 2011 at 19:45

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