How do I copy a file larger than 4GB to a USB pen drive?

Question

I am trying to copy a 6GB file, but it won't copy.

Answer 1

This is due to FAT32 limitation. Files larger than 4GB can NOT be stored on a FAT32 volume. Formatting the flash drive as exFAT or NTFS will resolve this issue.

WARNING: Backup your data. Formatting will delete all the data in your device.

Answer 2

If you don't want to reformat your USB drive you can split your big file into parts, e.g. for your case:

split -b 4G /path/to/input.file /path/to/pen/drive/output.file.

This will create the following files:

4,0G output.file.aa
1,6G output.file.ab

The filesize of output.file.aa matches exactly the maximum file size of your FAT32 formatted USB drive, which is 4 Gibibyte (GiB, that's not the same as Gigabyte GB). See man split for the full documentation.

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Before you can access the file you need to merge it first. On Linux system you can do so with:

cat output.file.* > input.file

The corresponding command on Windows systems is:

copy /b output.file.aa+output.file.ab input.file

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Along with many other useful GNU utilities, split can be installed in Windows too, see GNU utilities for Win32.

Answer 3

Linux only

If you intend to use the drive only with Ubuntu (and other linux distros), it is a good idea to use a linux file system, for example ext4. This way you might get higher read/write speed (depending on which process is the bottleneck), and you will get higher flexibility concerning ownership and permissions.

• You can use the GUI program gparted to create the ext4 file system.

Full compatibility with Linux, Windows and MacOS

Windows has problems with linux file systems, and I think MacOS has problems with NTFS. So if you want 'full compatibility' for reading and writing, only FAT32 and UDF remain.

• UDF lacks tools to repair the file system.
• FAT32 has a 4GB limit for file size.

This link describes how to create and use UDF,

Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks

Windows

So if you want full read/write access from Ubuntu and Windows, I would suggest that you use NTFS. (It is possible to use exFAT with some special tools, but I recommend NTFS.)

• You can use the GUI program gparted to create an NTFS file system.
• In Windows it is easy to create an NTFS file system too.

MacOS

In MacOS it is possible to use FAT32 and UDF.

You can also use ext4 with a workaround, Ubuntu Server with an SSH server in a virtual machine. (I think the same workaround would work also with Windows.) This may be worthwhile when you intend to access a lot of files via the drive and its file system, but maybe not with a small USB2 pendrive.

See this link,

Using ext4 on OS X Yosemite, the long but safe way

Answer 4

Having had a simular issue and unwilling to reformat the USB stick, I just used an archiver. More or less all modern GUIs (such as File Roller, 7Zip, etc.) or CLIs allow for splitting the archive file. Set the split limit below the FAT boundary (that somewhat 4GB), for speed you can choose a low compression rate, even "store", i.e. do not compress at all, an voila!