There must be many thousands of users who have stumbled into this landmine left for us by MS. Wonder what all they did and what all disasters have never been understood or solved. Facts are you can SAVE a file whose total path length exceeds the 260 characters allowed. You will get no error message in doing so. When you try to open it later the error window says you cannot open the file and then adds "Access denied" without ever saying or offering any clue as to why. Of course 'access denied' in English implies something totally afar from the real issue! And this disease has some other significant symptoms. Win 11 allows you to STORE a file you can never read or open without shortening the name. If you do periodic SAVES to protect yourself, the COPY process only tells you a file name is too long to copy without giving you enough info to find the offending file !! That means many backup efforts are defeated at least for some files. Russian Roulette. Maybe those files will never matter or they may be critically important. And of the several dozens of "Backup" mechanisms that exist, supplied software with a drive, etc. I wager there are wildly varying ways in which this is handled (or even ignored.) Geesh !!
MS Throwing Curves at us - File Name Length
- Thread starter JWR
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