At 09:13 AM 11/29/2004 -0600, you wrote:
>I am hoping that some of our members who are more technology savvy than me
>can shed some light on a problem we ran into this week-end.  Here is what I
>know.
>
>Does any one have any experience with this? Any suggestions on how to
>handle this?


WOW!

You were provided some excellent information by Michael and Lorie gave you
a valid link for further info on the topic...  I'd like to add a little
information that I've learned along the way on this to the mix... not quite
as technical in nature, but may be relative to what you're attempting to
resolve.

While Michael is correct regarding  VFAT file names "allowing" 255
characters, they are truncated by the system to an 8 character (or fewer)
name... so what you see may be a longer name, but hat's not what the
computer knows the file by... and I think this was what Michael was
speaking of when he gave this info:

Windows has some capacity to translate file names on the fly
for DOS based programs, by dropping anything over eight characters before
the first period/decimal point encountered (while doing a bit of numbering
with the last few characters if needed), and truncating anything after the
last three characters past the period/decimal point. Thus, when you look at
"My Happy Long File Name.document" in a DOS window, it may appear as "My
Hap~1.doc". The max path size was 80.

Where (and why) this is critical is that if you suffer a system crash and
need to perform a "restore from backup", you may find that all of your long
filenames have disappeared and have been replaced by the MS generated
"Hap~1.doc" file names used in the example above.

Now, this may not seem like much of a problem, unless you have 30-40 files
all starting with "Hap" and ending with ".doc" =)  You would need to open
up each of these files, determine what they are, and rename them to
whatever long name you want to assign to them.  And a piece of advice if
you get into this dilemma... before you start doing this... make sure you
go into "view" and select "details", then sort the files by type, name and
date.  This (providing the files haven't been opened, modified and changed)
will allow you to at least identify the oldest and newest versions of these
"Hap~XX.doc" files... and if you've been working on a document that has
revisions and/or versions saved, this step can be critical.  If you open
the files and then close them PRIOR to doing this, the system will save
them and append the file attributes with the date and time you last opened
it automatically... this is an automatic "feature" of MS Office because the
files are determined to have "temporary names".

The other place the false long file names is a problem is if you use
certain backup software, like ROXIO Easy CD Creator or others that can't
manage long file names.  I learned this with PowerPoint and Adobe
files.  Typically, I save these on my system with their names as received
from others or as downloaded.  The problem is, when you burn a CD of these
for backup to take them off-line, they are unable to manage the long names,
so the backup simply skips them (another "wonderful" automatic feature of a
software application =) ) and backs up only the filenames it can manage.

So... you may want to check and see if this is a problem for you as well.

Larry

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