Hi Jin.
When will the 255 char length change? I seem to remember it used to be a constant somewhere in a header file in the old days.
However, with information lifecycle management and storage management going - and nested parts of filehirarchies across the network this constraint is almost impossible to work with. The only warning you get today is if you maintain the hierarchies frequently as in manual and take note of any length is to long kind of thing. A very usual example is that of saving web pages. If a user does not wrap it up in a container and save it as .html from IE then in the ..._files folder you can have very deep paths almost beyond the 255 chars inside it. For example the Sharepont team and others uses very descriptive names (of course) - however that just goes beyond the 255 limit. So even Microsoft itself does seem to care about that limit any more like in "it should not be there" - or not our problem.
I actually think its kind of strange that such a single but very important thing has not got changed in so many years.
I hope you will forward this to the server team.
NFTS have more or less become dynamic. Database have variable strings lenghs. How come it has to stay like this.
I usually can't just copy files today as in 100 GB. I will get like 50 prompts about a too long file name. Then I have to like sit there and hit skip - and then afterwoods maintain everything left over to make it happen below 255 chars without changing the file system (too much) ... ie folder paths and so on.
In NTFS - this way - you can hardly have logical named folder if it nests more than 5-6 folder deep. Of course you could use Dev\X\1.x.x\... but thats how you did in the old days. Altthough gone in Vista, something like "C:\Documents and settings" reserved like about 24 chars or almost 10% of the fully qualified file name within that contraint of 255 chars. And that is just for starters ... the comes the user name ... may be appended with the domain name and his documents folder. Then you can go like double to 50 chars and loose about 20% of the contraint. So it took 20% of the contraint to beyond the system files and get into the user file system. You haven't even started traversing user file path yet. And that was just locally.
We need the ability to use long file names - and that 255 char length constant keeps us from doing it.
Strange it going to be like that forever! No ... then please remind the server team or NTFS guys.
Its gotta go away!
BTW This post reminded me of that issue. Incredible nobody seems to care about getting rid of that anoying issue ...
Everytime I am confronted with this issue its like somebody says - hey we now about it and I think ...ok, don't complain because they know about and some day it will go away. Well I seen the release of XP, 2003, Vista and now 2008 including several service packs ... so when do we get to use the file system. This is actually kind of blocking for a lot of nice network use, symbolic links etc. You just know today - care about the path length, keep it down - or the file system becomes unsuable. Especially when you run the backup all stuff goes out, skips or become obscured beyond 255 chars.
So the complaint. Hope it will be fixed within the next 10 years - no it has to go in NTFS 7 ... Windows 7 ... i.e. guess the DB file system must be coming around - and eventually fix it. WinFS Team jumped into SQL Server Team, ehh? Guess new file system will come along, soon enough.
Anyway would be nice to have that fixed ...
