Reply to Airman PD -- Windows Zip folders failures

[George]

Airman PD,

I tried your suggestion, and it helped, at least in a
theoretical sense, but it also brought up some new issues.

First of all, I discovered by experimenting with copying
the top-level folder to my desktop that there were
*pathnames that were too long* (according to the error
messages I got) for Windows to handle. I do have about
seven levels of folders, so that did not totally surprise
me. So, I temporarily removed those folders and files with
the long pathnames, and then the Windows copying process to
the Windows CD Burning folder worked.

Then, I decided to try your Zip method using Windows'
built-in Zip utility. Well, everything -- *including* the
previously mentioned folders with the pathnames that were
too long -- copied over OK into the Windows zip file. So,
presumably if I were to try to burn this using Windows' CD
burning utility, I would not have the problem with data
loss (missing folders and files) that I had before.

But, I discovered that any saved Web pages would not open
the *images* that were saved in their corresponding "web
page filename_files" folder. Only the *text* of the HTML
page was showing. A problem, but not too bad. So, I
extracted them. Well, when I extracted the whole top-level
folder that had been zipped, I got a bunch of pop-up
messages prompting me to enter a *password* for many of
these files, as well as a few Word files. There are *no*
passwords on any of these files or folders. So, I had to
skip extracting those files and therefore lost dozens of
files.

Any idea as to why this happened, or other comments?

Thanks again.

George

-----Original Message-----
Zip the folder up, then burn the zipped file.

.

..

 

[Airman PD]

Had a similar problem copying backups across a network once, only
surefire answer I found was to rename the offenders. BTW, if you're
saving HTML files and their images, you can save them as .MHT or web
archives which put the images and HTML in a single, shortnamed file.

 

[George]

Thanks, Airman PD.

When you say "rename", do you mean that I should rename the
file or folder in such a way as to *shorten* the path? In
other words, even though I got erroneous prompts for a
password that didn't exist, do you think that the issue
still has something to do with the length of the pathname?
Or are you saying that simply renaming the file or folder
-- even if the new name is the same length as the old one
-- is doing something mysterious behind the scenes that
eliminates the Password issue?

Despite having done some research in books and online, I
don't know what the limit is for the number of characters
in a PATHname or the limit on the number of folder levels
(if there is one), but I believe that the limit in XP on
the FILEname itself is 260. The thing that puzzles me is
that the entire PATH to one of the problem files is only
about 166 characters long, including spaces. So, I can't
figure out why Windows error messages yesterday told me
that the "filename" (actually referring to the pathname in
my case, I believe) was too long.

George

 

[Airman PD]

Yes, shorten the name. When copying files, windows does funny things
sometimes. Check here for a dated, but still good discussion of long
filenames:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/fat_Long.htm

 

[George]

Thanks for the clarification and the link.

Have a good day.

George