Friday, March 18, 2016

OneDrive Filename Restrictions

Bob LeVitus:

The OneDrive menu reports 3,803 problems, and has been reporting them for over a month. The problem is that when I select View Details, it crashes and leaves a broad white stripe across my display that can only be eliminated by Force Quitting OneDrive.

I think it’s fair to say OneDrive is useless to me until this bug is squashed.

So, I wrote to Microsoft technical support about the issue on February 9 providing logs, screen shots, and a complete description. It took a month but I finally got an answer. Not a solution, mind you, but at least I got an answer.

In short, OneDrive has restrictions on the characters that can be in your filenames, and the total path length must be fewer than 255 characters. Nobody seems to be able to build a better shared folder than Dropbox.

Update (2016-04-10): Arq Backup:

PSA: OneDrive allows a max of 150,000 items in a folder. (This limit isn’t mentioned in their documentation anywhere that I can find.)

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A lot of this is a problem due to Microsoft deciding to maintain better Win95 compatibility with WinXP rather than going full bore in updating these sorts of things. That said, since it's a syncing service rather than a true networked drive, you'd think they could inject a little compatibility layer to make Mac people happy.

Of course dirty secret is OneDrive is among their worst products. You have to resort to the terminal to even get the app to work with the business edition of Office!

The so called MAXPATH limit is pervading the entire OS. A critical part of Microsoft's build tools offering ("msbuild.exe") is suffering from this same limitation. People are begging them to fix it:
https://github.com/Microsoft/msbuild/issues/53

Microsoft's response is that they are busy with other "innovations" and can't go back to fix this ridiculousness.

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