i cannot access my files on my flash drive

Take control of your files and folders with AB Commander file manager for Windows 11, 10, 8.ġ. How to change the drive from FAT32 to NTFS or exFAT format? For example, many Android phones and tablets, as well as the recent versions of macOS support exFAT devices pretty well.

The exFAT system is not as advanced as NTFS (it does not support file permissions and access control, for example), but it has more support on the non-Windows platforms. However, if you plan to use the external drive with non-Windows devices (such as an Android tablet or a Mac computer), it would not be recognized by such devices out of the box, and you would need to install additional software or tweak their settings quite a bit to make them work with the NTFS drives. The NTFS file system is supported by all modern versions of Windows (including such dinosaurs as Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT), and it also supports many other functions not supported by FAT32: file security, encryption, compression, etc. They both are pretty good, but which one to choose depends on how else you are going to use the external drive or SD card. Which file system is better, NTFS or exFAT? These newer file systems do not have the 4GB file size limitation! Scroll down this page for the instructions on how to change the file system. In any case, how to solve the problem of copying the 4GB files? Easy: you need to replace the FAT32 file system on the drive with a more modern one, such as NTFS or exFAT. Or, maybe the designers hoped that by the time such large files become common, the use of the FAT32 system would be replaced by the more modern systems. This limitation may sound silly: why would anyone design a system that would not allow for the larger files? The problem is, when the FAT32 file system was designed (that was back in the days of Windows 95), no one anticipated that we would have such large files in use today. Although the total size of the files that you can copy to a FAT32 drive could be as large as 2TB (or the physical capacity of the drive, whichever is smaller), the size of each individual file may not exceed 4GB. This type of a file system has a built-in limitation on the size of the files that it may contain.

If you experience such a problem, most probably it’s caused by the fact that your external drive or card is formatted with the FAT32 file system. Yet, when you attempt to copy a large file (4GB or larger) to the external drive, Windows gives you an error (such as: There is not enough free space on the drive, or similar.) Does this sound familiar?

You can copy the smaller files to the external drive just fine. The capacity of your external flash drive or SD card is large: 8GB, 16GB, or more. Encrypt and password-protect files with Encryptability encryption software for Windows 11,10,8.

I cannot access my files on my flash drive