Samba problems with file xcopy

[lwj]

On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 21:13, M.Hockings wrote:
> I'm trying to do some quick backups from a Win2K laptop to a Fedora Core 
> 1 desktop but it ain't working.  The backups are just a bunch of 
> xcopy's. Most of them run fine but two fail and I don't understand why.  
> It appears that xcopy is attempting to create directories in both 
> cases.  When I run the backup targeting a Win98 desktop there is no 
> problem.  Any ideas as to what the problem might be?

xcopy is not a suitable tool for backing up under Windows. I am not sure
why your problem is occurring but I do know, from personal experience,
that it is possible to create directory structures that are so deep that
the command line tools will not work correctly with them. I believe that
I have run into the case where Windows itself has created this problem.

When this occurs 'weird' things happen, some of them are not what you
would expect. For example, one time I was helping out a fellow developer
with a build problem on our source code tree. The convention at our
company was to install the source at c:/{projectDirectoryName}. This
developer did not want to pollute his root directory so he placed them
under c:\projects\{projectDirectoryName}. I was traversing down his
source tree checking the makefiles (we used something similar to
mkdepend to generate them). At each level I would type 'edit makefile'
and this worked fine until I reached a certain point then the command
processor could no longer find the edit command. 

I have also had problems with xcopy failing with weird error messages
when trying to copy things with long path names.