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Any software for long filenames?

PostPosted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:15 pm
by ric
I admit it. I'm a long filename junkie. I try and cram as much information into a filename as I can. That's a lot of information.

The problem is I can't find any non-trivial way of putting those files on CD or DVD. Pretty much every software I've looked at for DVD burning peters out at 128 characters (I'm not sure if that doesn't even include the path). Things are a little better on the CD burning side with RecordNow! products that support up to 212 (which is still less than Windows).

I recall reading that UDF 2.01 support 256 characters which would make it truly Windows compatible with filenames, except I haven't found any software that actually implements this.

I'm trying to transfer a hefty amount of data between work and home, so they can be synchronized. I'm trying to avoid doing this over the Internet. But my attempts so far have failed. Trying to directly burn the files causes various burning software to truncate them. I finally gave up on that and made a big Winrar file, and burned that to a DVD. But when I tried to extract it at the other end, It would claim the path is too long and it can't be written. This happens regardless of where I try to extract a file, so I think Winrar tries to copy everything to a temporary place with the full, original path, then copies from there to the final location. In this case, the temporary path is too long to be supported by windows.

I think other archiving tools might work better than Winrar. However, before I spend time trying to find one, I was hoping someone out there has taken this problem seriously and written something to deal with it.

Is there ANY software that can burn a CD or DVD with support for any FAT32/NTFS filename? (Windows software, that is...) I don't even care if I need to install special drivers to support a proprietary format, or ideally just load an application to allow reading from the disc. But it would be nice to be able to do it.

There are lots of programs now that can create CD/DVD images and create virtual CD/DVD drives using the image files. I was wondering if there isn't such software for FAT32 or NTFS. In other words, the software would create a virtual drive or virtual partition onto which you can copy any files you want to backup. The virtual drive would be stored in an image file, which could then be written to DVD and loaded on another computer. Anyone ever hear of such a thing?

If not, can anyone suggest the best zipping/archiving software for efficient archiving and expanding for DVD backup use?

Thanks!