Cannot copy large files to Flash Drive

[sharris]

But why backup your FreeBSD system on a FAT32 filesystem anyway?

This is great for when you have only one large over-priced flash drive that has Windows FAT32 files on it and you want to save a compressed FreeBSD partition. I like dump too but I like to fully understand the one I'm working with first, mostly, than go back to the others I played with. Anyway, this is about the only way to make gzip takes care of all of those zeros properly, which is the main point of this operation. 40GB down to 323mb is not bad at all and it decompress perfectly.

COPY A PARTITION - FINAL:

dd if=/dev/ad4s1 ibs=4096  |  gzip > /2/FreeBSD-8.1-ad4s1.gz
42,952,379,904 -   40.0GB  =  323mb -  860s =  14.0m  -  47.0MB/s

It's not a "UNIX size limitation", but a FAT32 (pretty old and outdated filesystem) limitation.

Now I learn the hard way but look at what it forced me to learn about. Gzip is fun. It's a trip not knowing how things work but it's a gas when you come up with an un-common solution that works. dd gives you 100% backup of every single bit. Tar will defrag by 0.1% - or 1 full percent, I forgot. Don't know about dump, other than in the real world, production, cron dump would be the way to go.