Recently I made a back up of a VirtualBox VM drive clone for the intention of moving the drive to another machine. The VM drive was using a variable sized hard drive with a cap at 200GB. The clone was only 52GB so far. I had a spare 64GB thumb drive, so I figured that would be the best way to move it since the target computer was not on the same network as the source computer. I wanted to compress this folder and them copy it to the thumb drive to speed the copy process. So I used WinRAR. It took an hour and a half to zip that 52GB folder to a 19GB ".rar" file. I then plugged in my trusty thumb drive and attempted to copy the file. To my horror, I got the dreaded message, "The file 'Ubuntu 10.04 Clone.rar' is too big for the destination file system." ... What?! But I have 64GB available!
Long story short. The thumb drive was formatted using FAT32 (as opposed to NTFS), which is an "older" Windows file system that does not allow for files greater than 4GB. WinRAR is now my best friend. I then needed to re-compress the 52BG folder, but this time set "Split to Volumes, size" as "4,095 MB (FAT32)". What WinRAR does is creates a set of files that are broken up by the file limit you set. The last file is usually smaller. So now I ended up with 5 files all 4GB each except the last one was 2GB. And copying them to the thumb drive worked great.
In order to decompress these files, you need them all together, and right click one of them, usually the first file. Select Extract to... and select the details.
Problem solved!
