Windows Vista Complete PC Backup and large file support

vista_wallpaper Chris Muench shot me an email a week or so ago and asked me if I had run into a Complete PC backup issue with the following obscure error message “A semaphore has expired”.  He had tried several hard drives as the target and it always seemed to fail at the same point close to the end of the backup.  He indicated to me that he was backing up about 65GB of data.  This certainly wasn’t an unusual amount of data.

As it turns out, the reason he hit the error message and it failed is because he was trying to backup a file larger than 4GB.  I always wonder why the error message just can’t say that.  You know something like, “I’m sorry, we cannot backup files larger than 4GB.”