The Requested Operation Could Not be Completed Due to a File System Limitation (Asigra)

On trying to backup an Exchange database using Asigra we were seeing the message “The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation” after about 4 hours of backing up. This was an Exchange database backup (non VSS), and it was copying the database to the DS-Client buffer.  The Exchange database was 1TB+.  The DS-Client was running on Windows 8.1.

The message:

The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation  (d:\buffer\buf\366\1\Microsoft Information Store\database1\database1.edb)

Solution:

There is a default limitation with the Windows file system for supporting large files. We had to reformat the buffer drive on the DS-Client using the command:

format d: /fs:ntfs /L /Q

After making this change we no longer experienced the error message and backups completed successfully.