What is the secret of copying large files between the hard drive and an external drive on a Mac Notebook?

It’s probably the file system on your external. Try formatting it with another file system that supports large files. I know that fat32 has a pretty small max file size.

If that doesn’t work, you could always zip the file (or rar it or whatever) and let the computer segment it up in 2 gig chunks.

13 gigs is pretty big. Just to make sure, some things to check. And I mean no insults by these.

Check to see that you have over 13 gigs of space for the file.

Check to see that your machine isn’t shutting down or going into energy save or something that interrupts it?

could the mode, firewire vs USB2 be an option for speed?

If you have space, try duplicating the file on your computer. This will hint at wether or not the file may have corruptions.

i’ve had this issue before. i usually have to chop them up into 10 minute chunks, which you can do through quicktime.

just make sure you use the same format, i handled bigger last week so make sure it’s both a capable format, good luck

Max file size on a FAT32 HDD is 4 gigs… this may be your problem, assuming you have a single flie above 4 gigs.

Second the energy saver check (disable), also make sure the external is formatted to HFS+ (doesn’t have to bE journalled). Close any non-essential apps, and check for any firmware updates for your MacBook (Apple Menu/Check for software updates). Make sure the internal hard drive hasn’t reached 80 percent capacity otherwise you may run into virtual (system) memory problems.

13 GB is gigantic for any single file. I understand that this is video, but wow…that’s huge. Chopping it up or reducing the file size by any method is recommended, simply for management alone.

Energy saver shouldn’t be a factor. The Mac is smart enuf to know that it’s in the middle of a copy and not do that.

If you have to use the drive you are attempting to copy to as a cross-platform device (i.e., with Windows or other OS) FAT32 isn’t the best. NTFS is far better and will handle large file sizes.