6 ms·

C:\ONGRTLNS.W95, OneDrive

53 points by smcgivern 12y ago

pavel_lishin 12y ago
> To add insult to injury, every time OneDrive encounters a file whose path is too long, it just shuts itself down and completely erases all of its settings. I have no idea how this was missed in QA.
- acchow 12y ago
  Possibly because Windows has a 255-character limit per pathname component; HFS doesn't. I suppose unit tests for some encoding internals are shared between the two clients.
  - xenophonf 12y ago
    The Windows API has a nominal 260-character pathname limit, including the leading drive letter designator (e.g., "c:\") and the trailing NULL, but the Unicode versions of the various file system APIs have different limits, as does NTFS internally. The limit to which you're referring is actually a maximum NTFS filename (pathname component, as you said) length limit of 255 UTF-16 code points, which is also the maximum size of an HFS+ filename.
    - Someone 12y ago
      There are issues other than component length. HFS+ happily stores characters in paths that NTFS does not accept such as | and $ (and, I think to this day, /. Traditional Mac OS used colons as path separators. The Mac OS X Unix layer swapped colons and slashes) Also, NTFS and HFS+ use different Unicode normalization algorithms (IIRC, the Mac decomposes strings; that would make Mac paths longer in some cases) If you look closely, it is a miracle that we can have interop between different file systems at all. There is a lot of ugliness here. For example, see what Microsoft says about that 255 character limit: "The Windows API has many functions that also have Unicode versions to permit an extended-length path for a maximum total path length of 32,767 characters. This type of path is composed of components separated by backslashes, each up to the value returned in the lpMaximumComponentLength parameter of the GetVolumeInformation function (this value is commonly 255 characters*)." So, before starting that copy, you really should query the target disk for its maximum pathname component length. Finding hat disk in the presence of reparse points, substituted drives, etc. may be a challenge in itself.
Someone1234 12y ago
I can totally relate to how insanely screwed up Microsoft accounts are, particularly when it comes to regions. I purchased a Surface 3. Later on I decided to add their warranty ("Microsoft Complete") due to concerns about heat levels on the i5 S3. So I went to their warranty page, entered all my info, and nothing. It stopped me on the shopping cart page with the warranty in my basket, no error. Just refuses to continue. After spinning up the developer bar and looking at the network tab I was able to discern that an error was being returned but it was just a generic internal code with no description or Google-able resources. I talked with support, they couldn't help me, and just suggested I email a different support email address who never got back to me (even now). After a couple of weeks I had all but given up on ordering the warranty. But after having activated Google Authenticator on my Google Account, I decided to poke around in my Microsoft Account settings to see what they offered security-wise, and noticed my "basic info" region was set to the UK (I am in the US currently), even though my billing info was set to the US... After changing my "basic info" region the warranty site just worked correctly as you'd expect. Not that I ever would have known that had it not been for pure luck.
- cridenour 12y ago
  You might try a different browser. When I used Chrome, no matter what I tried I couldn't sign up for Office 365 for Small Business. With strange errors about fields not on the page. When I switched to Firefox, it magically worked.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    One of the first things I tried was using it in IE.
xenophonf 12y ago
These problems with path names on the Mac have been an issue ever since FolderShare was originally ported to Mac OS X. Those limits are straight out of the Windows API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx).
- asveikau 12y ago
  You can bypass most of these limitations on Windows by prefixing your path with \\?\. Suddenly instead of 260 chars you get 32k if memory serves. And trailing dots and spaces (at the end of a file or before its extension -- limits that come straight out of FAT's direntry structure) are OK. So really I'd say these are limits of not knowing or bothering to use the escape hatch in Windows's support for this stuff.
  - 13 12y ago
    I always wondered why Wine prefixed unixy paths with that string.
  - xenophonf 12y ago
    I completely agree. Because of this we ran into all sorts of problems getting FolderShare/Live Mesh/whatever Microsoft calls it these days to sync files between Macs and PCs. I ended up writing a Perl script that would periodically scan the Mac's shared folder for non-ASCII file names and normalize them by brute force. It was ugly. I told my boss that if it broke, he got to keep both pieces.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) Microsoft takes a very "lowest common denominator" approach to backwards compatibility. A LOT of third party software would definitely be broken if they altered Windows filename restrictions. They would also have to drop support for FAT32 as you pointed out. Right now a lot of Windows 95 software continues to run 20 years later. And in no small part because of this type of attitude and all the runtime patching Microsoft does.
ahassan 12y ago
Why not just use Dropbox? It's always been extremely reliable for me on my Mac.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  That is stated in the article. They're already paying for Office 365 so SHOULD be entitled to "unlimited" OneDrive storage. It just doesn't work (either the unlimited or OneDrive in general).
  - bambax 12y ago
    Something that's "free" but doesn't work isn't free, it's a waste of time. What's the point of being "entitled" to broken??
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      I didn't use the term free and there is no point.
thefreeman 12y ago
Not detracting from any of the points of the author, but this line caught my eye: For example, you can’t start files with a space, something a lot of people do to move files to the top of alphabetical lists. Do people really do that? That would drive me bonkers. Granted, I mainly work from a CLI so I guess it may not be as annoying if you mainly use a GUI.
- cordite 12y ago
  We have to do that in our database for numbers since zeros get truncated off the left side if it is detected as a number--and the number of zeros is important. I don't know about people doing stuff in file systems these days like that, but it is a simple hack.
  - naturalethic 12y ago
    Uh what. Do you use Excel as your database?
    - cnvogel 12y ago
      I think /cordite/ tried to make a sarcastic joke. Or did he...?
      - cafard 12y ago
        The ways of Microsoft controls can be interesting indeed. At one point, we had to reverse-sort phone numbers to be loaded into a VARCHAR column in SQL Server. The vendor used a Microsoft control, which would look at a couple of phone numbers, say 2025551212, conclude that they were suitable for 32-bit integers, and choke somewhere around the 404 area code. Then there was the time another package tried to write out street addresses that were something like 3E123 or maybe it was E456. Apparently the control read them as numbers in scientific format that were just way too big.
        cordite 12y ago
peterkelly 12y ago
"Just for fun, I tried to buy another Office subscription, but this time, the Euro store informed me that I can’t buy an Office subscription, because I’m in the store for the wrong region" After reading the recent "Bullshit jobs" article, I wonder how much human effort has been expended on deliberately making it harder for someone who happens to be in one country to buy from a company that happens to be in another.
cbhl 12y ago
The Author should really consider contacting Microsoft Support, especially if they're a paying Office 365 customer. When I moved from Canada to the US; I had to go through about two or three reps but managed to get everything sorted out after about an hour or two. Much nicer than what Google made me do: abandon my old GMail account and create a new one.
- LukasMathis 12y ago
  Yeah, I didn't put down the whole story in the article. I actually did talk to support at some point (there's no email address, so I had to call them). The first-level support rep wasn't able to help me, and I spent so much time talking to that person that I simply didn't have the time to start fresh with somebody else. Maybe I'll try again when I have a day off.
  - cbhl 12y ago
    Strange. In the US, you can get tech support over live chat. When one session wasn't bearing fruit, I opened another chat session to get another CSR at the same time and the second CSR managed to figure it out.
mzr 12y ago
I've been using OneDrive on multiple Macs and have not encountered the pegged CPU. It seems to be a bit better than the Windows client, which takes ages to transfer a file to the local drive.
kyberias 12y ago
TIL that people use whitespaces in the beginning of filenames to order them.
hadoukenio 12y ago
PSA: Don't use OneDrive if you value your privacy: http://cryptome.org/2014/11/ms-onedrive-nsa-prism.htm

53 points by smcgivern 12y ago

> To add insult to injury, every time OneDrive encounters a file whose path is too long, it just shuts itself down and completely erases all of its settings. I have no idea how this was missed in QA.

acchow 12y ago
Possibly because Windows has a 255-character limit per pathname component; HFS doesn't. I suppose unit tests for some encoding internals are shared between the two clients.
- xenophonf 12y ago
  The Windows API has a nominal 260-character pathname limit, including the leading drive letter designator (e.g., "c:\") and the trailing NULL, but the Unicode versions of the various file system APIs have different limits, as does NTFS internally. The limit to which you're referring is actually a maximum NTFS filename (pathname component, as you said) length limit of 255 UTF-16 code points, which is also the maximum size of an HFS+ filename.
  - Someone 12y ago
    There are issues other than component length. HFS+ happily stores characters in paths that NTFS does not accept such as | and $ (and, I think to this day, /. Traditional Mac OS used colons as path separators. The Mac OS X Unix layer swapped colons and slashes) Also, NTFS and HFS+ use different Unicode normalization algorithms (IIRC, the Mac decomposes strings; that would make Mac paths longer in some cases) If you look closely, it is a miracle that we can have interop between different file systems at all. There is a lot of ugliness here. For example, see what Microsoft says about that 255 character limit: "The Windows API has many functions that also have Unicode versions to permit an extended-length path for a maximum total path length of 32,767 characters. This type of path is composed of components separated by backslashes, each up to the value returned in the lpMaximumComponentLength parameter of the GetVolumeInformation function (this value is commonly 255 characters*)." So, before starting that copy, you really should query the target disk for its maximum pathname component length. Finding hat disk in the presence of reparse points, substituted drives, etc. may be a challenge in itself.

Someone1234 12y ago

I can totally relate to how insanely screwed up Microsoft accounts are, particularly when it comes to regions. I purchased a Surface 3. Later on I decided to add their warranty ("Microsoft Complete") due to concerns about heat levels on the i5 S3. So I went to their warranty page, entered all my info, and nothing. It stopped me on the shopping cart page with the warranty in my basket, no error. Just refuses to continue. After spinning up the developer bar and looking at the network tab I was able to discern that an error was being returned but it was just a generic internal code with no description or Google-able resources. I talked with support, they couldn't help me, and just suggested I email a different support email address who never got back to me (even now). After a couple of weeks I had all but given up on ordering the warranty. But after having activated Google Authenticator on my Google Account, I decided to poke around in my Microsoft Account settings to see what they offered security-wise, and noticed my "basic info" region was set to the UK (I am in the US currently), even though my billing info was set to the US... After changing my "basic info" region the warranty site just worked correctly as you'd expect. Not that I ever would have known that had it not been for pure luck.

cridenour 12y ago
You might try a different browser. When I used Chrome, no matter what I tried I couldn't sign up for Office 365 for Small Business. With strange errors about fields not on the page. When I switched to Firefox, it magically worked.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  One of the first things I tried was using it in IE.

xenophonf 12y ago

These problems with path names on the Mac have been an issue ever since FolderShare was originally ported to Mac OS X. Those limits are straight out of the Windows API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx).

asveikau 12y ago
You can bypass most of these limitations on Windows by prefixing your path with \\?\. Suddenly instead of 260 chars you get 32k if memory serves. And trailing dots and spaces (at the end of a file or before its extension -- limits that come straight out of FAT's direntry structure) are OK. So really I'd say these are limits of not knowing or bothering to use the escape hatch in Windows's support for this stuff.
- 13 12y ago
  I always wondered why Wine prefixed unixy paths with that string.
- xenophonf 12y ago
  I completely agree. Because of this we ran into all sorts of problems getting FolderShare/Live Mesh/whatever Microsoft calls it these days to sync files between Macs and PCs. I ended up writing a Perl script that would periodically scan the Mac's shared folder for non-ASCII file names and normalize them by brute force. It was ugly. I told my boss that if it broke, he got to keep both pieces.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) Microsoft takes a very "lowest common denominator" approach to backwards compatibility. A LOT of third party software would definitely be broken if they altered Windows filename restrictions. They would also have to drop support for FAT32 as you pointed out. Right now a lot of Windows 95 software continues to run 20 years later. And in no small part because of this type of attitude and all the runtime patching Microsoft does.

ahassan 12y ago

Why not just use Dropbox? It's always been extremely reliable for me on my Mac.

Someone1234 12y ago
That is stated in the article. They're already paying for Office 365 so SHOULD be entitled to "unlimited" OneDrive storage. It just doesn't work (either the unlimited or OneDrive in general).
- bambax 12y ago
  Something that's "free" but doesn't work isn't free, it's a waste of time. What's the point of being "entitled" to broken??
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    I didn't use the term free and there is no point.

thefreeman 12y ago

Not detracting from any of the points of the author, but this line caught my eye: For example, you can’t start files with a space, something a lot of people do to move files to the top of alphabetical lists. Do people really do that? That would drive me bonkers. Granted, I mainly work from a CLI so I guess it may not be as annoying if you mainly use a GUI.

cordite 12y ago
We have to do that in our database for numbers since zeros get truncated off the left side if it is detected as a number--and the number of zeros is important. I don't know about people doing stuff in file systems these days like that, but it is a simple hack.
- naturalethic 12y ago
  Uh what. Do you use Excel as your database?
  - cnvogel 12y ago
    I think /cordite/ tried to make a sarcastic joke. Or did he...?
    - cafard 12y ago
      The ways of Microsoft controls can be interesting indeed. At one point, we had to reverse-sort phone numbers to be loaded into a VARCHAR column in SQL Server. The vendor used a Microsoft control, which would look at a couple of phone numbers, say 2025551212, conclude that they were suitable for 32-bit integers, and choke somewhere around the 404 area code. Then there was the time another package tried to write out street addresses that were something like 3E123 or maybe it was E456. Apparently the control read them as numbers in scientific format that were just way too big.
      - cordite 12y ago

peterkelly 12y ago

"Just for fun, I tried to buy another Office subscription, but this time, the Euro store informed me that I can’t buy an Office subscription, because I’m in the store for the wrong region" After reading the recent "Bullshit jobs" article, I wonder how much human effort has been expended on deliberately making it harder for someone who happens to be in one country to buy from a company that happens to be in another.

cbhl 12y ago

The Author should really consider contacting Microsoft Support, especially if they're a paying Office 365 customer. When I moved from Canada to the US; I had to go through about two or three reps but managed to get everything sorted out after about an hour or two. Much nicer than what Google made me do: abandon my old GMail account and create a new one.

LukasMathis 12y ago
Yeah, I didn't put down the whole story in the article. I actually did talk to support at some point (there's no email address, so I had to call them). The first-level support rep wasn't able to help me, and I spent so much time talking to that person that I simply didn't have the time to start fresh with somebody else. Maybe I'll try again when I have a day off.
- cbhl 12y ago
  Strange. In the US, you can get tech support over live chat. When one session wasn't bearing fruit, I opened another chat session to get another CSR at the same time and the second CSR managed to figure it out.

mzr 12y ago

I've been using OneDrive on multiple Macs and have not encountered the pegged CPU. It seems to be a bit better than the Windows client, which takes ages to transfer a file to the local drive.

kyberias 12y ago

TIL that people use whitespaces in the beginning of filenames to order them.

hadoukenio 12y ago

PSA: Don't use OneDrive if you value your privacy: http://cryptome.org/2014/11/ms-onedrive-nsa-prism.htm