Archive Error - Unable to Write

[misterwiley]

Hey all, I'm having a strange thing happen with one of my plan files. This does not happen with any other plan file and seems to be related to the title length of the .plan file. If the name of the .plan file is to long then auto archive throws this error out at me. Has anyone else experienced issues when you have a file name which is long and have auto archive stop working?

 

 

[misterwiley]

Can confirm that by simply doing a SAVE AS and shorting the name by 15 characters or so the error goes away. It didn't feel like the file name was very long but I guess Chief has some limitations in file name length that I was not made aware of. Any who, hope this helps someone else down the road that might run into the same issue as me.

[lbuttery]

I can only suggest using MUCH shorter file names

 

that is one monster of a file name ...

 

I believe folder names are also included when bumping into the overall path limitation which is 255 characters

if I remember correctly 

 

 

Lew

[Kbird1]

12 hours ago, misterwiley said:

Chief has some limitations in file name length that I was not made aware of

 

Windows not Chief has always had a File Path Max length ( number of characters), under Win 10 I believe it is now 260, not 255 though.

 

But there are also ways around it with a Registry Change in Win10 ver. 1703 or higher  BUT the Program must also be "long name path aware" to be able to use the longer

path the registry change supports.

 

M.

[misterwiley]

Yeah I was aware of the 255 limitation but my file name was only 88 characters long here and throwing the error. Wasn’t until I got down under 75 characters that the error went away. That 75 character limit is definitely new to me.

 

I also didn’t realize folders names counted as part of the 255 character limit. That doesn’t seem right to me but I’m also not sure. If that is the case this that would explain it I suppose.

[Kbird1]

27 minutes ago, misterwiley said:

255 limitation but my file name was only 88 characters long here

 

The Limit does include the Full Path number of characters including spaces etc, not just the Chief File Name ....you maybe right but I am not counting them from your pic

 

A quick google finds plenty of supporting docs at Microsoft etc.... about MAX PATH LENGTH

 

[WendyatArtform]

9 hours ago, misterwiley said:

Yeah I was aware of the 255 limitation but my file name was only 88 characters long here and throwing the error. Wasn’t until I got down under 75 characters that the error went away. That 75 character limit is definitely new to me.

 

I also didn’t realize folders names counted as part of the 255 character limit. That doesn’t seem right to me but I’m also not sure. If that is the case this that would explain it I suppose.

 

The length is not just your file name, but includes the entire path.  In this case, it will also include the additional digits added by Chief for the archive

[WendyatArtform]

Also - in X12, I'm having a problem saving to my network drive, and I notice your drive is D, not C. 

 

I'm still researching my issue, but have confirmed that I can save on my C drive, but get the error on my network.

 

Below is an excerpt from my tech support ticket - in case it helps you:

"It is really hard to give a definitive answer to why that would be occurring. For some reason though that file is locked by the operating system.

The most likely and most common reason we have seen this recently is due to backup or cloud storage services running on the directory where the file is saved. Most of the time these services do a good job of not locking the file when it is in use, but we have seen cases where it can still happen. "

[misterwiley]

8 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

 

The Limit does include the Full Path number of characters including spaces etc, not just the Chief File Name ....you maybe right but I am not counting them from your pic

 

A quick google finds plenty of supporting docs at Microsoft etc.... about MAX PATH LENGTH

 

 

Thanks for sharing the source there Mick. This all makes scenes to me now. I should come up with a shorter naming scheme for my files that have so many different options to them.

[misterwiley]

18 minutes ago, WendyatArtform said:

Also - in X12, I'm having a problem saving to my network drive, and I notice your drive is D, not C. 

 

I'm still researching my issue, but have confirmed that I can save on my C drive, but get the error on my network.

 

Below is an excerpt from my tech support ticket - in case it helps you:

"It is really hard to give a definitive answer to why that would be occurring. For some reason though that file is locked by the operating system.

The most likely and most common reason we have seen this recently is due to backup or cloud storage services running on the directory where the file is saved. Most of the time these services do a good job of not locking the file when it is in use, but we have seen cases where it can still happen. "

 

I have a small SSD of 125gb for my C: drive and then a larger 1TB SSD for storing all my applications and such which is D: drive. One this to note that might be different then you setup is that Chief is also install under the D: drive and saving to the D: drive.

[Alaskan_Son]

11 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

under Win 10 I believe it is now 260, not 255 though.

 

I believe it's been 260 for a long time.  I think the 255 number is a generally accepted length after a few necessary characters have been accounted for (drive letter, colon, backslash and....not sure...file extension or terminating characters or some other technical jargon). 

[Alaskan_Son]

In addition to being able to remove the path length restriction in Windows 10 (a quick search will show you how), you can also actually map a folder to a drive letter thereby cutting out a whole bunch of characters from the path name.  Plenty of articles out there on this as well.  Just search something like "map local folder to drive letter".

[Smn842]

Windows has supported 32,767 characters path lengths in of the Unicode versions of many file functions from some time when used with a "\\?\" prefix.  The reason Microsoft doesn't just switch every function to support that length is due to the way data is often passed between programs and the Windows API as this could cause crashes or issues with older code that assumes the older fixed maximum 260.   

 

Therefore its not a problem to write code that works with very long paths (I've had to on many occasions for long network paths) but the challenge is legacy code/third party dlls and other applications not being able to work with such files/folders, although this is improving all the time. More recently Microsoft has a implemented an option for applications to opt in to existing API calls working with longer paths without special prefixes so hopefully we're getting nearer to the time this issue finally goes away.

 

As @Alaskan_Son mentioned this can be worked around by assigning a drive letter to a path, and there's also the option of using the various Windows files system links (junctions/symlinks) to create a new folder say 'C:\CA\Arcs' that in fact points to the existing archive folder and avoid extra drive letters if that is a concern.