Using the Desktop Client or WebDav it is possible to synchronize data with Research Drive from various operating systems with different file systems which all have different rules for file naming length and special characters. For example in Mac you may be able to use a space after the name of a file while in Windows this is not permitted. To make sure that your data is interoperable it is important that you use file and folder naming which will not conflict on different systems. The easiest way to do this is to use simple(but informative) file and folder naming without any special characters at all. In fact, making file names readable and compatable with multiple file systems is a FAIR principle because it ensures interoperability.
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Depending on the underlying file system used individual files may have file length limitations as well limitations on the length of the full path. This means when synching data to these systems there could be issues if the file names are too long. These lengths are summarized for various file systems below. The advice is to think about cross-compatibility for all systems.
Filesystem | max. Path Length | max. Filename Length |
---|---|---|
(*) Btrfs | No limit defined | 255 bytes |
(*) ext2 | No limit defined | 255 bytes |
(*) ext3 | No limit defined | 255 bytes |
(*) ext4 | No limit defined | 255 bytes |
(*) XFS | No limit defined | 255 bytes |
(*) ZFS | No limit defined | 255 bytes |
APFS | Unknown | 255 UTF-8 characters |
FAT32 | 32,760 Unicode characters with each path component no more than 255 characters | 8.3 (255 UCS-2 code units with VFAT LFNs) |
exFAT | 32,760 Unicode characters with each path component no more than 255 characters | 255 UTF-16 characters |
NTFS | 32,767 Unicode characters with each path component (directory or filename) up to 255 characters long (MAX_PATH). Starting in Windows 10, version 1607, MAX_PATH limitations have been removed from common Win32 file and directory functions. However, you must opt-in to the new behavior. For more details see Enable Long Paths in Windows 10, Version 1607, and Later | 255 characters |
Case Sensitivity
A smaller problem is that certain operating systems are and aren't case sensitive. Linux and Unix systems are usually case sensitive so the files Example.txt and example.txt would be seen as different files. However Windows and Mac(by default) are not case sensitive so this could cause a synchronisation error.
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