Windows Vista File Copy Woes
July 14th, 2007
Now, I don’t know if you have come across this, but Windows Vista has an upper limit on the number of files that its Explorer can copy in a single operation. I am in the process of moving a bunch of files off of one of my Linux servers – in preparation for some reload-y goodness – to my newish 500GB drive housed in my primary Windows box. A quick Google of the problem reveals several posts about Vista having a limit of 16,384 file copies in a single operation. The strange thing is, these posts all mention receiving an out-of-memory error message. In my case, all that happens is the copy dialog closes itself. That’s it. Nothing else.
I can’t help but wonder about this. With drive sizes ever-increasing and drive prices ever-plummeting, why would a so-called modern OS have such a low limit? Is it something that slipped through the cracks with the decision to not include WinFS in the initial release of Vista? I am also not sure about the number 16,384. I have been copying a lot of files today and I swear that one of those operations involved either 19K or 20K files…it is only when I try for 23K+ that it seems to misbehave. Very odd.
