Tips to Solve 'Cannot copy [file]' Error in SD Cards

FAT16 and FAT32 are the two most commonly used file systems of digital memory cards such as SD (Secure Digital) cards. But it is often recommended to use FAT32 over FAT16 for three top reasons:

Support to larger number of directory entries
Allowance to keep longer file names, and
Capacity to store comparatively larger number of files

Users of FAT16 SD memory card often complain about difficulties in storing more files even when the storage space appears to be quite empty. In such situations, the user may come across unavoidable situation of reformatting the SD card and restoring from backup, later. But if the backup fails to restore, a SD Card Recovery solution can help.

The following illustration will help you to comprehend such problems in more detail. Consider you use a 32 GB SD memory card. You connect the SD card to your computer and try to copy and add more photos to it. But you observe that the card denies to copy the file and reports an error that reads as below:

"Cannot copy [file]: The directory or file cannot be created."

where, [file] is the name of the file you are trying to copy. The SD card is formatted to FAT16 file system.

Cause

FAT16 can hold a maximum of 512 entries in its root directory, which is much lower than that of FAT32 capacity of 65,534 entries. Also, in FAT16, long file names utilize two or more directory entries and hence lower down the overall capacity of the file system. The maximum number of files that you can store on a FAT16 device is 65,517, while on FAT32 device, it is 268,435,437.

The above error can occur if the SD card already contains maximum number of files that FAT16 can hold or the root directory is full.

Solution

Following are a few tips that can help you recover from such problems:

Create a subdirectory and copy all your files to it
Avoid assigning long file names
To permanently avoid this issue, reformat the SD card to FAT32 file system and restore from backup

In case you find backup unavailable, incomplete or prompting errors, use a SD Card Recovery Software to recover data from formatted SD card. The SD Card Recovery utilities are easy to use and prove competent in restoring lost photos, audios, and videos from SD cards.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a reliable SD Card Recovery Software that recovers all types of digital data from formatted or corrupted SD card. The tool is available for both Mac OS X and Windows operating system. The software supports SD, miniSD, microSD, and SDHC memory cards.

Article By Shaun Pattrik