File name and file path limitations in Windows and OneDrive. Use LibreOffice, Google Drive, and Linux OS Instead.

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works.

I do a lot of research that results in multiple layers of folders, and very long filenames for documents. While both Windows OneDrive and Google Drive have a limit of around 250 characters for file path and file name combined, my personal experience has been that I frequently cannot upload to OneDrive what I consider to be a reasonable number of characters, while I have never had a problem uploading and downloading the exact same file between my Google Drive folders and my Linux machine.

The Windows Problem

Windows has a flat-out limit of 250 characters combined for file path and file name, when those files are synced to OneDrive. The limit is not only baked into the Windows-to-OneDrive code, it seems to be baked into the Windows OS itself. Which means that your Office programs and your Windows PC summarily reject files with long file paths and file names (which, in many use cases, I would argue that they are necessarily long).

The LibreOffice-Linux Solution.

I'm not going to pretend to know, much less understand, all the technical reasons for the character limitations imposed by Windows or Google Drive. Again, all I know is that I often hit a roadblock when I try to upload files with a long Path and File Name to OneDrive. At the same time, of course, if you want to rename a file that already exists in OneDrive, you will be prohibited from doing so if the renamed file name now, in combination with the path, exceeds the 250 character limit. On the other hand, I have yet to experience the same problem with Google Drive while syncing with, uploading to or downloading from Google Drive. Now, I don't know if, or how, the OS itself comes into play; all I know is that I can accomplish my end goal on my Linux machine; I cannot on my Windows machine. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Only comments that improve or disprove the contents of the posts on this blog will be approved. Opinions and speculations generally will not be approved. "Self-serving" links will not be approved. Product and advertising links will not be approved, but plain text recommendations might be approved. No form of vulgarity or cursing will be approved. No personal disparaging remarks will be approved. All comments become the property of this blog immediately upon the member's/reader's posting of the comment. All comments may be rejected or edited without recourse to or by the commenter. By posting, you agree to hold harmless this blog, its owner, editors, administrators and contributors, even if your post is approved as-is.

Popular posts from this blog

LibreOffice Freeze and Slowdown - "Memory" and "Undo" Settings

Image
Our Standard Cautionary Tale on Forums There is a lot of useless junk in forums that purport to tell you how to fix the memory issues in LibreOffice. Most of them are useless because many of the fixes are based on old, outdated versions of LO, say, for instance, version 5.0 or lower. They are also useless because there is always a lot of speculation and guessing taking up space in a forum.  The fixes below cut through the useless junk, and they simply work. We assume that you are on an updated version of LO, such as 6.5 or higher, thus many of the improvements to memory settings are already baked into LO.  Skip the Details For those who don't need all the "what's" and "why's," skip to the highlighted fixes for items 5 and 6 below. Background In earlier versions (see above) of LibreOffice (nee, OpenOffice), memory settings caused the program to react slowly or not at all, depending on the task you were executing. Most of those freezes and crashes had to d...
Read more

Creating an Epub file with a clickable TOC using Libreoffice and Google Docs

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. In LibreOffice: Create a LibreOffice Writer document. Format the document using Styles, using Headings (1,2,3,4 etc) for TOC levels (example: Heading 1 for Chapter name; Heading 2 for Chapter Subtopic; and so forth). Insert a Table of Contents into the document (Insert, Table of Contents and Index) “Create From” “Additional Styles” Select the Heading levels you used in your document (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading etc.).  Select only as many levels as you want to see in your TOC. To Create a PDF in LibreOffice File, Export to PDF Choose “Archival” and “Export Outlines” (in addition to other Default settings). To Create an epub from a LibreOffice Writer file DON’T USE THE LIBREOFFICE FUNCTION (File, Export to Epub) if you want to create an epub that includes a TOC with...
Read more

Inline Styles Have Arrived in LibreOffice 25.n

Image
We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As of this post, Inline Styles for LibreOffice Writer are still very new and, as TDF points out in their features section, still a work in progress. Overall, IMO this is one of the best and most important new features of Writer, especially for advanced or power users in the Business sector, but also for a wide range of other document (books, articles, instruction manuals, etc.) creators. System Ubuntu 25.04.2 LTS App LibreOffice 25.2.0.3 and ff. A Slick Inline Styles Trick As I thought about how I have used Microsoft Word's Inline styles in the past, and how I might use Writer's new Inline Styles in my current work, I took into consideration how using Inline Styles (IS) would affect (a) how things looked in Writer's Navigation view, (b) How they would app...
Read more