So, you know when you have been working on that file and you go save and put it in your company folders on a server or storage drive and it takes the first line of text as the file name….
Then later you go back and look for that file or try to move it and you get some sort of error, something to do with file path or length!!!
Well, here is an explanation of what is happening from our Mr. Whiffin:
Hi Bob,
I have mentioned this in the past but most likely not directly to yourself. Windows and many devices do have a limitation to the number of characters in filenames/paths. Just in case anyone doesn’t understand what a path is, it is referring to the location that a particular file is in. Let’s say for example that you have a file inside of the documents folder called “Word Document 1.docx” on your local workstation and your windows username is just “user”. The filename in this case is called “Word Document 1.docx” and is only 20 characters but the file path is referring to the entire location of this file which in this example would be “C:\Users\User\Documents\Word Document 1.docx” and the length of this is 44 characters.
The reason that you are experiencing the error above is because of the length of folder/file names that are being used by staff initially on the NAS. For example, if someone decides to make a folder under live projects, business name, followed by an address for example this path is going to reach this limit very quickly. Then when a new word document is created to save into this folder, word has this habit of choosing its own name based off the first sentence of the document and people just accept it. For example, say I am the customer at The Computer Workshop Group and I’m wanting to save a document under our address in your live projects where the document starts with “Hi David, the guys can start working on your job in one months’ time and the cost is going to be X amount of dollars. If you need further information about this, please let us know.” In this example if I am to use the default filename that word generates the full path here will be “S:\Live Projects\The Computer Workshop Group\361 Bayswater Road, Garbutt\Hi David, the guys can start working on your job in one months’ time and the cost is going to be X amount of dollars.docx” and the path length is 194 characters.
If you’re experiencing these issues then the solution is that folder paths, filenames need to be reduced or abbreviated. Unfortunately, there is no easy workaround to this and it’s just something that everyone needs to be aware of. It’s most likely that there are many folders that are nested deep within each other and likely long folder names.
Hope this makes sense. You should be able to resolve the problem by renaming some of the folders/files beneath the file you were trying to open but WARNING be careful what folders you are renaming because if you went and renamed the Live Projects folder to just LP for example then everything inside of this folder needs to be uploaded to OneDrive again which is a huge amount of data and also if someone tries to open a file from their recently opened files or shortcuts from their desktop to the NAS they will be trying to access the old folder name.
Just try to understand the above and then maybe give us a call before you change anything.
Kind Regards,
David Whiffin | Senior Technician
Hope this helps if not please feel free to give us a call
