System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2
Hi,
I have a disk replica that is 3 TB in size. It successfully creates the disk replica and successfully creates disk recovery points but it won't complete the job to tape, long term protection. The tape errors indicate it cannot access files and folders.
Upon investigation these files and folders exceed the 260 length and I get the standard error on the backup target (server 2012 R2: (Source File Names are larger than is supported by the file system). Once these file paths are adjusted to the smaller length DPM tape job will fail again but for the next file path that is inaccessible due to the length of the folder path. So the backup is definitely failing to tape due to the character length restrictions on the folder path/file character length.
Here is it where gets interesting: On the disk replica which does successful backups keeps track of all the file paths using the format \\?\GlobalRoot\device\harddiskvolumeshadowcopy\Restofthefilepath\. When using the prefix\\?\ for the device Namespace it can support a longer string up to 32,767 characters in the file path, which is awesome news for disk backups (short term protection), Reference on\\?\ Please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247%28VS.85%29.aspx.
Why isn't this same format on the disk replica applied to the tape backup\\?\ and fails with the 260 character long file paths?
There are quite a few long file paths here on the target server for backup, so I much rather a root cause fix rather than changing all the long folder paths.