Is there a file size limit on Windows?

I'm using Windows 7. I just lost a .vdi file (a virtual hard drive for my VM), and I'm wondering if there's a file size limit for windows which might have caused a problem. I hadn't checked the size of the file lately (I set it to dynamically size as needed), but it was 15 to 30Gb at a guess.

It wouldn't back up using Windows Backup, but is it possible Windows has just stopped recognising it because it's too big? Is there a clear upper limit on file size?

Solution 1:

If the drive with your file is formatted with NTFS (which is the default in Windows 7), then according to Wikipedia, the maximum file size is 16 TB. Even if you were to (attempt) to exceed that limit, you would simply be unable to make the file any larger. It might lead to some strange behavior in VirtualBox, but would not cause the file to disappear.

What exactly do you mean by "lost"? Have you tried doing a search on the drive for *.vdi? It seems more likely that it got accidentally deleted or moved somehow.

Solution 2:

As designed, the maximum NTFS file size is 16 EB (16 × 10246 bytes) minus 1 KB (1024 bytes) or 18,446,744,073,709,550,592 bytes.

As implemented, the maximum NTFS file size is 16 TB (16 × 10244 bytes) minus 64 KB (64 × 1024 bytes) or 17,592,185,978,880 bytes.

Source: Wikipedia