I just bought a 120 gigabyte external hard drive, and whenever I try to save an SPSS file
that’s more than 4 gigabyte onto it, it stops and says “Warning #5322, The attempt to save the data file has failed because the disk is full, an I/O error has occurred, the variable dictionary is invalid, or the task was interrupted”

I didn’t have any trouble saving 2 or 3 gigabyte files of the save type. Is is possible that there’s some other kind of glitch in my file.”

To our information there is no limitation in file size, variables or cases. This information is not checked with SPSS, since we do not have a support contract. If anyone else has and is willing to ask SPSS about this, we would be very thankfull. But, the cause is probably an error in the data or variables.

The error has been discussed in the SPSSX-L mailinglist. In this discussion Raynald Levesque suggests the following cause to the problem:

“If you have string variables, check that the number of characters differs
from the declared length of that variable.

eg if you have a variable declared as format A2 but that variable contains 3
characters. In recent versions of SPSS, more integrity tests are performed
when saving a file and this would cause an error.”

You can check your file by hand or use the automated method Raynald suggest in his second post.