#43 After uninstall, cannot delete folders due to NTSF filename length limit being exceeded

[Anonymous]

Originally created by: paultrap... (code.google.com)@gmail.com

Latest version as of April 19, 2013.
OS is Windows8 64bit.

Hello, I thought I would try your nifty program, with much thanks to you for so kindly making it available as freeware. I couldn't understand what it was doing, as I could still open any file in my destination folders following creation of pairs and clicking Encrypt and Close. I waited overnight and when I awoke I couldn't understand the resulting destination folders as everything still openned when clicking it, so I had no way of determining if the files uploaded from there to my box.net account were actually encrypted.

Anyway, I decided to uninstall it and then ran into that cannot delete NTFS issue when filenames are too long. I've tried doing it from DOS prompt console with no luck. If you know how to delete these stuck overlong files, I'd be very appreciative. No idea what to try next. The micrsoft explanation of how to do it that I found via google was not understandable to me, alas.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: paultrap... (code.google.com)@gmail.com

I downloaded and installed DelinvFile, launched it, navigated to the problem file that wouldn't delete, using DelinvFile's navigation window, and clicked DelinvFile's  "Delete File" button, and that worked.

It turns out this is a common issue with Windows, i.e., it can create invalid file names that prevent the file from being deleted by Windows, an issue that has been around since Windows98. Incredibly, Microsoft STILL hasn't fixed this in Windows8. Good Lord. I have spent five hours today trying to troubleshoot this issue. I ultimately had to download and install three different freeware programs to try to resolve it, and only the last one I tried, DelinvFile, worked.

I want to point out how I got into trouble. When using your cryptsync program for the first time, I pasted a very long password I got from a commonly used random cryptographic strength password generator. It generates very long passwords for use in AES 256 encryption. That is the only thing I did. You should consider a warning at that step in your program, i.e, DONT paste in a password longer than xxxx characters as this may cause a serious NTFS bug about too-long filenames and you will not be able to delete the file without help from a special program for deleting corrupted files or files with too-long filenames.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: operati... (code.google.com)@gmail.com

7-Zip File Manager created these zombie-long-name files, and 7-Zip File Manager can kill them too.

Navigate to the offending path and rename it from within the program. (However, even 7-Zip can't DELETE the files directly.)

It also does not work if you have numerous offenders.