Samba problems with file xcopy

[M.Hockings]

lwj wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I had thought about this but some of the other copies (Eclipse/WDSC 
workspaces) have far far deeper directory structures and they copy just 
fine.  I also considered that there might be some bad file or directory 
names but everything seems to be just fine (as far as I can tell).

To see if it was OK I set up a similar named share on a Win98 machine 
and all the copies went just fine.  So I expect it must be due to 
something in Samba (setting, defect, ??) but I have not been able to 
figure out exactly what it doesn't like.  I can manually create the 
directories but the copy still won't carry on and manually creating 
things is not really an acceptable solution.

Mike