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File System Limitation

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Apparently I am only the second person on the internet to hit this error (judging by my Bing search this morning), but I thought I would share the solution in case someone else ever hits it :).

I was attempting to copy a 150 GB VHD file from one Windows Server 2008 R2 server to another, and after approximately 30 minutes, I would get the following error:

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An unexpected error is keeping you from moving the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80070299: The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation.

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It turns out that the destination directory that I was copying to had NTFS compression enabled, and directories with NTFS compression enabled will not accept files over a certain size (according to this article on MSDN it is ~30GB: File Compression and Decompression).  As the file I was copying was just going to be archived, I disabled NTFS compression, zipped up the file, and copied it over with no problems.

For what it’s worth, although it was not the cause of my problem, I do see that KB 967351 mentions that this error can also be caused by a heavily fragmented hard drive.  The article also mentions compression as a potential problem, with 40-90GB as the threshold for errors:

Compressed files are more likely to reach the limit because of the way the files are stored on disk. Compressed files require more extents to describe their layout. Also, decompressing and compressing a file increases fragmentation significantly. The limit can be reached when write operations occur to an already compressed chunk location. The limit can also be reached by a sparse file. This size limit is usually between 40 gigabytes (GB) and 90 GB for a very fragmented file.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks. Helped me find the remedy for my problem.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Good tip. Thanks for posting

  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2011
    Apparently I am the third!  thanks for the post, explained my problem.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2012
    Awesome,  thanks so much for the solution.

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2012
    Thanks!  just hit this issue and glad to find the answer so quick

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2014
    Thanks for posting this. I ran into this twice in the past 24 hours, and after reading your post, I took a look at the drive where I was storing my VHD (It is a LUN mounted with iSCSI), and found that compression was enabled.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2014
    I am getting this error when trying to run a scheduled Dedup Optimization Job. I'm yet unsure whether this is caused by a failing Veeam copySync job. I got this working again after disabling the copySync job (on the remote server) and rebooting the local server. But it has come back again.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2014
    2012/2012R2 dedup, with very large files, also sometimes hits this 'file system limitation' issue
    Best solution is to reformat with /L as described in KB967351

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2014
    Add to the other limitations of NTFS such as path and file name exceeding 255 characters....

  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2014
    Thankx solved my problem

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2015
    samething on brand new 2TB drive...it will be nice to extend this limit in today's data mining world
    https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/3631590f-b430-4eb0-9e00-8a483e5797c4/c-bug-when-writing-on-windows-compress-folder-unhandled-exception-systemioioexception-the?forum=csharpgeneral