Acceptable file name length

[E Marek]

I use a program called Handy Backup to backup the folders
in My Documents to a second drive but when I compare the
original and backup they are not the same size. It seems
to be because Windows will not alow you to copy and paste
a file whose name is 'too long' to the second drive. Hence
certain files are skipped over in the backup process.

It seems strange to me that you can have files with long
names on drive C but you can't have the same files on
drive D. I have a program that can rename files to a
specified length but I don't know what length is allowed
on D drive.

Can anyone shed any light on this problem? Is there a way
to allow drive D to accept the long file names it
currently won't accept? If not what is the length of file
name allowed on secondary drives? I might be able to get
around the problem by setting Handy Backup to zip the
files in the backup and then transfer them to drive D but
I would much prefer a straight out duplicate backup.

 

[DILIP]

FAT systems have an 8+3 restriction for file name length
NTFS file systems have 255 characters limit with full unicode character set
If the file systems on the partitions are different the file names would
behave accordingly

 

[Alex Nichol]

I use a program called Handy Backup to backup the folders
in My Documents to a second drive but when I compare the
original and backup they are not the same size. It seems
to be because Windows will not alow you to copy and paste
a file whose name is 'too long' to the second drive. Hence
certain files are skipped over in the backup process.

It may be skipping files that are hidden or system; in which case it
will skip the desktop.ini files used to customise folders (including one
in My Documents itself. Windows will not stop you copying files
because of file-name length. And a FAT 32 file system's involvement
limiting to 8.3 names is a red herring.