Zip files with Java: Is there a limit?

Solution 1:

Quoting from Wikipedia:

The original ZIP format had a 4 GiB limit on various things (uncompressed size of a file, compressed size of a file and total size of the archive), as well as a limit of 65535 entries in a ZIP archive.

and about ZIP64:

Java's built-in java.util.zip does not support it as of September 2010, but it has been added to OpenJDK and is planned for inclusion in Java 7.

Solution 2:

It's a bug that's reported fixed in Java 7: http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4681995

One of the commenters on that tickets mentions TrueZIP as a workaround.

Solution 3:

There's a 4GB file size limit on standard Zip files.

See the wikipedia entry on zip files for some more info...... apparently you can get much much larger files if you use ZIP64 format.

p.s. if you find yourself trying to back up more than 4GB of data at a time, perhaps you should be considering a different approach? Maybe something that takes a versioned filesystem snapshot would be more appropriate?