Hacker News Reader

Comment by f4stjack | Hacker News Reader

The best thing you can do with an enterprise Onedrive is having long long file and folder names. The moment it exceeds 255 characters, the software application dies. I am ready to hear easier fixes but so far this worked:

- Rename the offending folder from the web

- Unlink the folder from the user's machine

- Delete the existing onedrive folder

- Relink and resync

The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.

Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.

View on HN

An elderly family member rearranged her family tree into folders that were so deep it broke onedrive entirely.

Of course it was not set to keep all files on the PC so it just trashed them.

Be careful.

I turned onedrive off and removed it. Then just cross fingers she drops dead before the disk does. If I go over there I robocopy it onto a USB stick.

My workplace has named (forcefully) the onedrive folder with around 35 characters. You add to that the path to that folder on the computer that is (forcefully) not on the root of a disk. I now mostly need a flat structure for my files. 4-5 subfolders and a file and onedrive dies.

You can change that setting in Windows so that it no longer has a 255 character limit.

Yes, you can but then if you have any older software in your system (for company reasons) will not play ball. And it is a workaround, not a permanent solution. Because we still do not have that fabled WinFS so...

Eh, NTFS supported long paths since forever, the problem is with applications using Win32 APIs that are limited to MAX_PATH (260 characters) path length.

There won't be a permanent solution unless all Windows applications start using NT path formatting - which won't happen.

One drive still dies though

Win64 lacks the problem with 255 characters [0]. However, stuff like File Explorer, which the vast majority of my users actually use, can only pass the first 255 characters to the registered application [1], so will Explorer will display stuff with huge long paths, double-clicking that file, or right clicking and "Compress to..." will cause an error.

0 - 32 bit windows will always have this problem.

1 - This is because File Explorer uses a hodgepodge of Win32 and Win64 stuff behind the scenes when running 64 bit windows.

so many times,… I’ve lost count

Reply on news.ycombinator.com