File Reached Maximum Size

Sparky1 · #1 August 26th, 2003, 06:20 AM

HP Pavilion, Windows 98, 20 GB (C

and 80 GB (D: & E

hard drives

I am using a Veritas Backup program to backup my main (C

hard drive onto a second (D

hard drive. I use only about 6 GB on C: but when it nears the end of backing up I get the error message "The backup file has reached the maximum size allowed by the file system. Please retry the operation with smaller backups or backup to a different device".

Two questions.

(1) I read something about the FAT 32 file system (whatever that is) has a maximum size of 4 GB. Is this true and is there a way to increase this?

(2) I backup the entire C: drive in one operation. Is it possible to break this up into smaller backups when backing up the entire C: drive?

Thanks for any help.

Sparky1 · #2 August 26th, 2003, 06:25 AM

Not sure what's up with the smiley faces but hope you can read it.

Wingnut · #3 August 26th, 2003, 08:20 AM

What version of Backup Exec. are you using??

This is a limitation of the FAT 32 file system. A workaround to this limitation is to split the backups into backup sets under 4 GB total size.

I am not sure, but I think you will have to do multiple backups. But I do not know a lot about Backup Exec.

An option you might want to consider is using a prgram called Ghost to take an image of HDD 0 and put it onto HDD 1. That way you will not only have a backup of you system, you have a drive that you can plug in and use straight away instead of having to restore backups.

Sparky1 · #4 August 26th, 2003, 05:11 PM

Thanks for the reply Wingnut. I am using Veritas Backup Exec 4.2, which is a few years old.

If the FAT 32 file system has a maximum 4 GB file size which can't be increased, I see no other solution than to split the backup into smaller backups. If anyone has done this or had a similar problem, would be interested in hearing about it. I'll also look into other backup methods.

Appreciate the help.