I had to do this in Vista just last week. Robocopy isn't hardlink aware, apparently. Or some versions of it aren't. I had a client that tried to copy a user profile in Vista and it eventually aborted after creating a dozen or more directories that couldn't be managed via explorer or cmd.exe.
I found it interesting, so I played with it a little bit, after I figured out how to resolve it. The POSIX/SFU tools seem to work fine with arbitrary length pathnames, so that was an option. And, as you said, renaming upper level directories to get the total pathlength down worked too. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 9:12 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: NTFS take ownership question On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 6:54 AM, Jon Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Kurt, have you ever had to deal with teachers and writers? They seem to > love very long folder and file names, at least mine do. A common cause of that here is the Internet Explorer "Favorites" system. Since every bookmark is also an on-disk file, and MSIE uses the page title as the favorite name, you can easily get file names of over one hundred characters. Combine that with the user creating a few levels of folders to organize his or her bookmarks. Combine that with roaming profiles on a DFS UNC path. Suddenly, 1024 characters isn't enough for everybody. For us, it gets reported quickly, because it hits a fixed buffer length limit in the user profile sync code, causing the user profile to fail to load. The user gets logged on with a temporary profile, and reports all their files are gone. The error messages indicated in the logs are vague and misleading, but the ginormous pathname is a big hint. (Come to think of it, this hasn't happened in a while. Maybe Microsoft fixed it at some point.) Windows Explorer also fell apart trying to manage the files, but I was able to work around that by moving a containing folder (further up the directory tree) up to a higher level, thus shortening the overall path length. Then I could go in and clean things up. -- Ben ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
