Fixing "File too large" error in Backup Tool in Linux Mint 18.3

[Jason]

One of the things that I found confusing was that when using the program called Backup Tool in Linux Mint (specifically 18.3), I kept getting error messages and it would never complete. I believe this program is specific to Mint and available across all the different desktop versions. Not sure if this applies to earlier versions of the Backup program.

Anyway, I kept trying to doing a backup of my personal files to a 32 GB flash drive but it kept kicking up an error message that the file was too big (repeatedly). Not sure if this USB drive came this way but it was formatted FAT32.

And that turned out to be the problem. The Backup Tool archives all the files into a single TAR archive file. And FAT32 doesn't allow a file to be larger than 4 GB, and this file was definitely larger.

I reformatted the flash drive as ext2 and changed the ownership to myself so I could write on it and now it works perfectly.

You could also change it to NTFS if you need Windows to be able to read the drive, too. I didn't use ext3 or ext4 because they're journaling file systems and as long as it's properly ejected, you don't really need to worry about that. Yes, NTFS is a journaling file sytem too, but you don't have any other choice on the Windows side.

By the way, it's always a good idea, especially in Linux, to properly eject your removable drives using whatever file manager you have or the storage icon in the task bar if you have one. Linux often caches writes until you run the eject command. Forget to do it, and you can lose data. Windows, it's less of an issue, but I'd still recommend doing it.

Incidentally, I use Google Drive as a backup as well, which is constantly being backed up to using Insync (thanks for telling us about that, Mike!). I do this extra backup occasionally because I live by the saying, "If your data doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist at all."

[fox]

I have run into this file size problems many times when trying to copy virtual machines to a FAT32-formatted partition, so I'm not surprised. But I never thought of formatting with ext2 or ext3 instead of ext4 to avoid journaling. Does this also reduce permissions problems when you insert the drive into a computer that the backup wasn't made from?

[Jason]

No, unfortunately, you will still have potential permission issues. You can fix them fairly easily but you do have to be able to access the drive as a superuser/root by opening File Manager with superuser privileges or just using sudo in the terminal before the command.

I'm surprised you get permission issues in FAT32 though. I didn't think FAT32 had file permissions. Are you sure you weren't using NTFS on those drives? It has file permissions.

I also read that you can use exFAT which allows for larger files without permission issues. That's generally the preferred option now but I think many flash drives still use FAT32.

[fox]

Your reply got me looking up exFAT, as I didn't know what it was. An article here explains the differences between fat32, exFAT and NTFS. What I wonder about is whether Linux distros normally have the capacity to read and write to exFAT drives without additional packages?

[Jason]

I notice that gparted in LM has the option listed but it's greyed out. Not sure what that means though it would suggest the capability is there, but it might be only via extra plugins. I'll check into this and get back.