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Things I Learned: Google Drive Downloads and Long Windows Paths

 While doing some experiments about how someone might backup the Soldersmoke blog, I came across an interesting issue. I'd worked with ChatGPT to create a Python script that stored a post from the soldersmoke blog in a directory. The name of the directory was the date and time of the blog post concatentated with the the blog post title. In most cases, this wound up being a file name with more than 256 characters. I dont' remember where I tried my first prototypes a few months ago, but whatever system I was on, it wasn't Windows, because Windows doesn't support folder or file names longer than 256 characters. Google drive, however, does.

As a result, when I tried to download the folders to a Windows machine, I got an error message indicating that the zipped directories from Google Drive could not be read. The simple fix, it turned out, was to change the naming scheme of the folders so that they contained only the timestamp of the post down to the second in UTC time. With the much shorter folder names, the downloaded zip files opened right up.



References

The SolderSmoke post about backing up the site
The script I've been using to pull down a post at a time and a little documentation

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Comments

  1. charlotte AsterJuly 29, 2025 at 6:46 AM

    You can try using a tool like LongPathTool. It helps manage and delete files or folders with long path issues easily.

    ReplyDelete

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