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Is there a limit to what a single folder or directory can hold?

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Good article.

Nitpick: your use of "terrabytes": the prefix is actually 'tera', only one r; from the Greek τετρα meaning four (since a terathing is 1000^4 things).

(Of course, if I was being *really* nitpicky, you technically want 'tebi' (2^40) rather than 'tera' (10^12); but since few people know what 'tebi' means and the difference is less than 10% I'll let you off there ;) ).

Posted by: Simon at May 14, 2007 9:44 AM

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Thanks, fixed the spelling.

Yeah, I consciously decided to avoid tebi for the very reason you mention. It
might be more accurate, but if no one knows what it means, does it really help?

(Yes, I also realize that actually using it would help further spread knowledge
of the word. I'll just claim that's happening here in the comments.)

:-)

Leo
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Posted by: Leo A. Notenboom at May 14, 2007 2:02 PM

I back up to an external hard drive. I can only back up 4 gb in one folder. I think it could be formatted with Fat32. Is their a way to reformat this drive to NTFS?

Posted by: Chris Ottaway at May 19, 2007 3:15 AM

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Yes. Look into the "Convert" command. It's a commandline tool that will convert
a drive from FAT to NTFS. It's included with Windows XP.

Leo
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Posted by: Leo A. Notenboom at May 19, 2007 7:43 PM

Hi! Actually I'm keeping incurring in a folder size limit of 102 GB. I have several external drives, all of them NTFS, and there is no way to store more than 102 GB in a single folder. Any suggestion?
Thanks

Posted by: Emidio at March 17, 2008 10:12 AM

Cracking site and I've been trying to find out why I can only store a few Divx files in a folder before its full. No I know why and how to fix it. Cheers

Posted by: Ansy at July 24, 2008 9:13 AM

I am creating an archive. Currently we are putting all of our files in one folder and have accumulated over 6,000 files. Is there a utility or piece of software that might have an inbox and place the files in automatically created directories with a maximum of 500 files to improve access performance.

Posted by: Dwarner at December 8, 2008 1:53 PM

Is it possible to put 1-2 thousand files in a folder in windows 2003 server and share it so that other users (more than 200) can directly execute exes from it. Or its a better idea to divide those files into sub folders inside the main folder. Thanks in advance.

Posted by: OP at February 16, 2009 6:27 AM

Can you share resources for learning more about the optimal way to store files in a web application? We currently put all files into the main directory, and this is creating some issues with copying and we think backups. One folder has over 185,000 files, all of which are fairly small. The copy rate is about 6 gig/hour on a LAN.

Posted by: Tb at July 13, 2009 4:51 PM

Does any one here know about the maximum number of files in a single folder for ext2, ext2 FS of linux.
?

Posted by: sreejith at August 29, 2009 7:44 AM
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