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DeepFilip's avatar
DeepFilip
New member | Level 2
6 years ago

You can't copy the item because its name is too long er includes characters that are invalid on the.

Hi, I have a Dropbox account with 2TB of which 6% is full right now. I am trying to copy a folder that only has a couple of GBs and I am getting this error message. What is wrong with the filename "...
Desktop
Error Messages
Mac
Sync
  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    6 years ago
    Hey there (DeepFilip), thanks for keeping the thread updated with the progress & apologies for getting back in touch with you with a slight delay. While this has been discussed here previously, I’d happily explain in a bit more depth under this conversation for posterity.
     
    It would be worth noting that there are files that your applications can't process correctly because they have file paths that are too long.
     
    This behavior is present if there are more than 255 characters in the entire file path. This means from the C:\ all the way to the extension of a file.
     
    As an example if you had a test.txt file in your Dropbox that had the following path:
     
    C:\Users\YourName\My Documents\Dropbox\test.txt
     
    This file would have a path that is 47 characters long.
     
    The Dropbox desktop application can read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters, which means that files will sync to and from those locations, however, the applications used to open or save said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, &c.) might not support reading from or writing to these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit them.
     
    Hopefully my message addresses your initial inquiry, however please feel free to check back with us here if you have any additional questions or thoughts! 
DeepFilip's avatar
DeepFilip
New member | Level 2

Hi,

Thank you for your answer. I do not really understand what you mean, my folder names are very short. I tried to rename the folders and files but nothing seemed to help.

What did help, it seems, is to copy the folder from my external harddrive to my laptop first. And then from my laptop to my Dropbox folder. Very odd, especially given the error message that I was getting, which was not explanatory to the problem I seem to be having.

Could you note this and find out what exactly is going wrong here, so other users will not be facing this problem?

Thank you

Jane's avatar
Jane
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
6 years ago
Hey there (DeepFilip), thanks for keeping the thread updated with the progress & apologies for getting back in touch with you with a slight delay. While this has been discussed here previously, I’d happily explain in a bit more depth under this conversation for posterity.
 
It would be worth noting that there are files that your applications can't process correctly because they have file paths that are too long.
 
This behavior is present if there are more than 255 characters in the entire file path. This means from the C:\ all the way to the extension of a file.
 
As an example if you had a test.txt file in your Dropbox that had the following path:
 
C:\Users\YourName\My Documents\Dropbox\test.txt
 
This file would have a path that is 47 characters long.
 
The Dropbox desktop application can read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters, which means that files will sync to and from those locations, however, the applications used to open or save said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, &c.) might not support reading from or writing to these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit them.
 
Hopefully my message addresses your initial inquiry, however please feel free to check back with us here if you have any additional questions or thoughts! 

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