[PLUG] Error splicing file

[Micah Cowan]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:09 AM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Oct 2014, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
> > While trying to copy five files of 4.7 GB each from one USB 3.0 external
> > drive to another external USB 3.0 drive by drag and drop with Thunar,
> each
> > file got to 4.3 GB and then Thunar threw up the amazingly uninformative
> > error message "Error splicing file."
>
> > Is this another "640K ought to be enough for anyone" thing?
>
> John,
>
>    More likely the code Thunar uses to copy files could not keep up with
> the
> data stream. Perhaps a buffer in/out issue.
>

Yeah, "4.3 GB" is a somewhat special number (being right around 4GiB), an
indicator that someone somewhere is probably relying on a 32-bit value
("unsigned int"?) to track the size of the destination file, and then
exploded when that turned out not big enough. Someone didn't test their
"large files" support adequately...

My first thought was that it's a filesystem issue, as FAT32, common on USB
thumbdrives, isn't capable of representing such files. But you indicated
that both drives can accept the file as long as it's dragged from your
larger hard drive, which seems odd that Thunar would handle that fine but
not the direct transfer. Probably still related to filesystems, as the only
explanation that comes to mind is that Thunar uses an inappropriately-sized
"size" counter for whatever filesystem is on the destination USB, but
somehow uses a more-appropriately sized counter for whatever sort of
filesystem (ext4?) is on the main HDD.

Be extra-sure to unmount the destination USB through appropriate means
before removing it, and then plug it back in again and verify the data's
integrity using sha256sum or something, from the command line.

-mjc