When copying a huge file to a drive you could see OS X freak out with a cryptic error messages. Around the lines of “Copy of file XYZ failed with error -NUMBER”.
One possible reason is that the target drive (maybe a shuttle one) is formated as “MS DOS” not as “OS X Journaled”.
Command-I when having the drive selected will tell you.
The file size during that error message is up on the screen will be pretty exactly 4GB. When you close the error then the file will be gone. Of course nothing get’s logged in the system log. Not sure if the finder has a log.
OS X: great unix. Kinda …