EOS Utility 3 won't download 300GB file from R5 to Mac when there's sufficient free space to do so.

[usern4cc]

I am trying to download a 301GB file from my R5 CFexpress card onto my Macbook Pro hard drive, which has 386GB free and I have emptied the trash completely.  Why is this happening?  There is plenty of room to download the file to my Mac.

I have previously downloaded a file this big to an external SSD card which had enough free space and that download did work (although it took 2 hours to do so).  So I free up enough main memory on my Mac to download it faster but now it says, "Insufficient free space at destination. Specify a new destination."

Can anyone tell me what is going on, and how to fix it?

[Waddizzle · Accepted solution]

It sound like the Mac feels that there is insufficient space to me.  I suspect you have an "Apple problem", one which is not really an actual problem or issue, at all.  It is probably just how the OS works.

Try this!  If you can download a 300GB file to an external SSD, then try to copy it from the SSD to your hard drive.  Do you still get the "insufficient space" message?  If you still get the message, then you have an Apple problem, not a Canon problem.

[usern4cc]

Thanks for the reply, Waddizzle!

I went ahead and transferred the 301GB file to my SSD card overnight.

This morning, I saw that transfer worked.

After reading your reply, I tried to copy the big file from my SSD to my Mac.  That was allowed! (and I stopped the transfer).  I then re-tried to copy the big file from my R5 to my Mac, and now it is working!  I didn't do anything else on the Mac at all!

The only thing I can think of is that overnight (with the Mac still "on") I'm guessing it had time to auto-rearrange memory so that it had it's free memory all put into a single contiguous block.  That would explain it.  But I don't know if Macs do this or not.  And I don't know if the Mac has "virtual memory" which can instantly re-assign blocks of memory as needed so that a large file doesn't have to be stored to a single continguous block of memory.