Is There an Upper File Size Limit on Copy/Cut & Paste?

Zepher said:

I recently dragged and dropped 2TB of data from a USB2 drive to a USB3 drive. Copied fine, just took over 24 hours to complete.

zepher, in the future if you have open ide/sata you may want to connect the drives internally then start the transfer. it's what i do. i learned very quickly that i don't like dragging from usb to internal and visaversa, so i know i'll never drag from usb to usb.

Yeah, drag & drop/Copy & paste - moving such large files/folders from/to a USB 2.0 storage drive is the slow boat to China method. Which is why I hate such transfers when using my USB 2.0 WD Notebook. Transfer speed is too slow for 2.0.

strollin said:

Bill2 said:

When you DRAG a file/folder into a folder on the same hard disk, the file/folder is MOVED (not copied) to the destination folder. If the destination folder is on a different hard disk, the file/folder is COPIED to the destination folder.

Copy/paste is, well, just that - COPY and PASTE.

That's the default action when dragging using the left mouse button. If you click with the right mouse button instead of the left on a drag, when you drop the files at the destination you can select whether to Copy or Move.

Correction: it's only the default action when dragging using the left mouse button if the source and destination folders are on DIFFERENT drives.

By default, if the source and destination are on the same drive then the default left mouse button action is MOVE, not COPY.

Using the right mouse button instead to drag, you will always get the popup when you release the button, with the proper default highlighted but which allows you to choose the other action if you want.


Personally, I almost always use 2-pane Free Commander (that shows source and destination in two panes) for all file manager operations. I've also memorized that F5 is "copy" and F6 is "move", so all I have to do is get source and target folders on the two panes, select what I want to copy/move in the source pane, and press F5 or F6 to accomplish it. This first presents me with a confirmation dialog to OK or cancel, just to be sure.

I like single-key keyboard shortcuts, and I like 2-pane visuals.

As fleamour discovered, it was some other under-laying issue which failed the copy/paste action.

I'd like to add, from recent experience, that file/folder name's of which combined length exceeds 255 characters can fail the copy/paste function. I located an app called "cutlongnames" which lists all offending files and allows edits of their length, proved very helpful. I now run this before I copy/paste.

Zepher, thanks for sharing that 2TB's is doable. I recently copy/pasted 266GB and soon will be copy/pasting a 449GB chunk of data. My thoughts had turned to wondering if there is an upper limit. Good to see I am safe at this time. I still wonder what the technical upper limit is for copy/paste?

I know this is old thread, but I felt I could add addition insight.

I recently came across this issue with a large iTunes library I had to move to a new computer for a coworker. No errors, just nothing would happen when trying to copy. I ran dskchk on the source drive, and it found some errors. After that, I could copy without issue.