SK0-004 · Question #376
A technician is backing up 10GB of data on a file server to a 250GB external USB hard drive. After 4GB has been backed up, the software generates an error that the size of the backup exceeds the…
The correct answer is A. FAT32. FAT32 enforces a hard 4GB per-file size limit due to its 32-bit allocation table structure, causing backups to fail once a single file reaches that boundary. NTFS, VMFS, and ZFS all support file sizes far beyond 10GB.
Question
A technician is backing up 10GB of data on a file server to a 250GB external USB hard drive. After 4GB has been backed up, the software generates an error that the size of the backup exceeds the file limit. Which of the following file system types is being used?
Options
- AFAT32
- BNTFS
- CVMFS
- DZFS
How the community answered
(34 responses)- A94% (32)
- B3% (1)
- C3% (1)
Why each option
FAT32 enforces a hard 4GB per-file size limit due to its 32-bit allocation table structure, causing backups to fail once a single file reaches that boundary. NTFS, VMFS, and ZFS all support file sizes far beyond 10GB.
FAT32's 32-bit file allocation table can only address file sizes up to 4GB minus 1 byte, a hard architectural limit. A backup application writing a single archive file will hit this ceiling after exactly 4GB of data and generate a file size exceeded error, which matches the described symptom precisely.
NTFS supports individual file sizes up to 16TB, making a 10GB backup file trivial to store with no size-limit errors.
VMFS (VMware File System) is designed to store large virtual machine disk images and supports file sizes well beyond a 10GB threshold.
ZFS supports theoretical file sizes up to 16 exabytes, making a 4GB file size ceiling impossible to trigger on this file system.
Concept tested: FAT32 4GB maximum individual file size limit
Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/default-cluster-size-for-ntfs-fat-and-exfat-9772e6f1-e31a-00d7-e18f-73169155af95
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