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Pomario
Asked: 2014-09-15 14:25:49 +0800 CST

Error using "cp" to copy files to an external disk

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I have a 2TB external HDD formatted with exFat that I use to share very large files (>10GB) among Ubuntu, Windows 7 and MacOS.

I am trying to copy the whole content of a directory using

sudo cp -r . /media/user/WD2TB

But I am getting the following output to what seems to be a very long filename

cp: cannot create regular file ‘/media/user/WD2TB/./Pictures/2013/Travel/2013-05-01_05:29_1367382554_Aaaaaaa_Bbbbbbb_Cccccccccc.JPG.xmp’: No such file or directory

Anyone knows why is this happening?

bash

2 Answers

  1. The filename contains a colon character : which is illegal in Windows and therefore likely not supported by the ExFAT filesystem.

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  2. Very long filenames often cause problems. You may try to copy the files with Rsync, however it's not guaranteed that the filesystem will actually support the long names.

    sudo rsync -rv . /media/WD2TB
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