Having a Problem Copying Files

[kiwikay]

Hi,

I'm new to WinMerge. I am not able to get files from one folder copied to the other folder. I have a 500 Gb external drive that I recently tried to copy onto a new hard drive as a backup, but in doing so, I got a number of messages that some file names were too long to copy so I had to skip those. Since I have no record of which files were skipped, I ran WinMerge to compare both drives. However, when I tried to copy files on the original drive to the backup drive, nothing happened. No error message, and they didn't copy over, as if I hadn't even sent the command.

When I looked inside each folder, it appears as though some additional files/folders on my original drive, but not on the backup, did not get picked up by WinMerge as missing (although I can't be sure of it, since I had to shut down my computer and what I thought I'd saved as the output of the comparison, simply runs the process again -- my computer is dragging and I don't have time to rerun this right now -- not even sure which folder to look in anyway to see if they were all identified this time).

Is this a problem related to the long file name? Is there a way to automatically copy the files creating new folders with shorter names, so I don't completely lose my file structure?

Also, will I be able to run WinMerge to find duplicates within a single drive/folder so I can eliminate duplicate backups?

Thanks for any help on this.

[jtuc]

Is this a problem related to the long file name?

Yes.

Is there a way to automatically copy the files creating new folders with shorter names, so I don't completely lose my file structure?

Not to my knowledge. But FastCopy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCopy) should be able to copy your folder trees.
(I am considering to invoke FastCopy from WinMerge to circumvent the limitations of the Windows shell functions, but this is low priority.)

Also, will I be able to run WinMerge to find duplicates within a single drive/folder so I can eliminate duplicate backups?

No. Rather use Duplicate Files Finder (http://doubles.sourceforge.net/).

[alexiusnor]

Long Path Tool is very useful if you are having problems in deleting, unlocking, copying and even renaming files that are considered filename too long by your system. This is best solution.

[jack.reacher]

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