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Is there ANY backup tool that can handle 256 path length limit on NTFS ?

I'm not talking about a sync or filecopy tool like robocopy,
but an incremental backup tool like cobian backup (which cannot handle it).

user19496
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  • rsync-based tools – wnrph Jan 28 '12 at 08:28
  • I have seen some shellscripts, using hard and soft links, that make rsync into an incremental backup tool. Is there anything similar using windows scripting ? – user19496 Jan 28 '12 at 10:29
  • you can do exactly the same thing on windows--using cygwin. – wnrph Jan 28 '12 at 10:30
  • I guess your right. It's not the answer I was looking for ( too much work installing flaky cygwin and some dodgy script :-) ). If you summarize this into an answer, I'll mark your answer as accepted. – user19496 Jan 28 '12 at 10:38
  • Are you sure Cobian cannot handle it -- even if you enter all paths with the `\\?\ ` prefix? – u1686_grawity Jan 28 '12 at 12:21
  • I will try that. I just dragged and dropped the root folders from Explorer. – user19496 Jan 28 '12 at 14:45
  • Prefixed all source folders with \\?\, and then marked all files as archiavble, but still cobian boletus copies a few hundred files less than robocopy /E, for the same source. – user19496 Jan 28 '12 at 15:56
  • I've had a similar problem with deep paths, which was a limitation of Windows, the work around was to mount/subst some deep directory so Windows could access the files that deep. – Scott McClenning Jan 28 '12 at 20:37
  • http://www.areca-backup.org/ was the ONLY tool that worked flawlessly with > 256 path length to external USB drives. it was not so user fiendly, so I ended up with a compromise, using Cobian as main backup tool, and RoboMirror/robocopy for plain syncing of the folders with extremely long paths. – user19496 Jan 29 '12 at 10:12
  • [Cobian Backup's v8 Release Notes](http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cbnew.htm) indicate that `MAX_PATH` should no longer be an issue, and it should handle 32K-length Unicode paths. If it's not backing everything up, that's a bug. – afrazier Feb 02 '12 at 19:27

1 Answers1

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Please note that I am not familiar with Cobian. Presently I use a simple script run from a CentOS vmware machine running in my Windows 7 host workstation to handle long path values:

#! /bin/bash
echo Backup Started `date` >> ~/backuplog
mkdir /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`
tar -cvf /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`/docs.data.tar /mnt/hgfs/c/Users/username
7za a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`.7za /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`
mv /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`.7za /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`
rm /mnt/hgfs/g/Backups/`date +%Y%m%d`/*.tar
echo Backup Completed `date` >> ~/backuplog

For an incremental script, you may want to look at the following pages:

Tamara Wijsman
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user8128167
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