Sometimes, when you copy a large file to a USB flash disk drive, Windows refuses to copy the file and shows an error – “File is too large for the destination”. This error could be because of two reasons – the file is really very large for the destination USB flash disk (the destination does not have enough free space) or the file system used on the destination cannot handle large files. In the first case, when there is not enough free space available, you cannot really do much except deleting some files from the destination USB flash disk to make space for the new files. But in the latter case, the error could be because of the file system used is something other than NTFS. In Windows, only NTFS can handle large files on your USB flash disks. If the flash disk is formatted using FAT or FAT32 file systems, then you cannot copy single files larger than 4GB in size.
The workaround is very simple in this case. All you have to do is format your USB flash disk with NTFS file system. Here is how:
- Insert your USB flash disk into one of your PC’s USB port. Wait for it to be recognized by the PC.
- When it shows up in the Windows File Explorer, open it up and backup all the important files to a location on the hard disk.
- In the Windows File Explorer, right-click on the USB flash disk drive and select Format from the context-menu.
- When the Format options window appears, choose NTFS for the file system and the Default allocation size for the allocation unit size. Then select Quick format option and click on the Start button.
- After the formatting is complete, you will be able to copy files larger than 4GB on it without any problems.
There could also be a disk partition corruption responsible for this error. If your USB flash disk drive is not displaying the correct disk size (for example, a 16GB flash disk is being detected as a 2GB flash disk drive by Windows), then you can restore USB flash disk back to its full capacity easily.