About File System Limits

Although there is no practical limit on the size or capacity of Zip files (.zip or .zipx) created by WinZip^® 9.0 or later, you may encounter limits imposed by your local file system or by the file system on external drives. See the notes below to learn how to determine which file system you have.

• On drives formatted with the FAT32 file system, the maximum allowed size of an individual file is approximately 4GB.
• FAT32 drives also place limits on the maximum number of files that can be stored in a single folder.
  
  

In view of these limits, you may need to use an NTFS-formatted drive to work with large files or large numbers of files. In most cases, you can right click the drive in Windows Explorer and choose Format to change the system. Note: Formatting a drive will erase the contents. It should also be possible to convert a drive to NTFS from a command prompt. The FAT32 limits are imposed by the file system and operating system, not by WinZip.

Notes

• To determine which file system a disk uses, open Windows Explorer, right click the drive, and choose Properties from the menu.
• When a system limit is exceeded, Windows does not always report the actual cause of the error accurately. For this reason, WinZip may indicate that the disk is full, that an archive is invalid, that there was a disk read error, etc., when in fact the true cause was that a system limit was exceeded. If you are trying to compress or extract large quantities of data, always consider your system limits as a possible cause of errors you encounter.