About Operating System and File System Limits

Although there is no practical limit on the size or capacity of Zip files created by WinZip 9.0 or later, you may encounter limits imposed by your file system or operating system. See the notes below to learn how to determine which file system you have.

On drives formatted with the FAT16 file system, the maximum allowed size of an individual file is approximately 2GB.
On drives formatted with the FAT32 file system, the maximum allowed size of an individual file is approximately 4GB.
FAT16 and FAT32 drives also place limits on the maximum number of files that can be stored in a single folder.
Windows 98 and Windows Me systems cannot create or access files larger than 4GB, even if the files are stored on a network drive that is formatted with the NTFS file system.

In view of these limits, you may need to use an NT-based operating system (Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows XP) and an NTFS-formatted drive to work with large files or large numbers of files. These limits are imposed by the file system and operating system, not by WinZip.

Notes

To determine which file system a disk uses, open My Computer, 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.