/ Forums / Advansys Formativ / Commercial Formativ Solutions by Advansys / Messages won’t write correctly to CD

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  • February 22, 2006 at 2:35 pm #4712
    dkallison1
    Participant

      I’ve used the message saver pack to save 4 years worth of email from groupwise. I have had success when I write the messages to files on my hard drive. However when I try to save copies of the messages to CD-ROM, I am losing thousands of messages.

      I’ve been using Roxio Easy CD Creator to write to CDs.

      Is this a know problem? Are there any known solutions?

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    • February 22, 2006 at 9:40 pm #8847
      Support 1
      Participant

        Thank you for your enquiry.

        This is not a known problem with Message Saver Pack.

        From your description, the issue is specifically to do with writing files to CD-ROM. The behavior may differ between Roxio Easy CD Creator and other software for writing CD-ROMs. Could you describe what happens when you are “losing thousands of messages?” Do you see error messages while writing files from hard drive to a CD-ROM?

        It’s difficult to guess at a solution without specific details of how messages are being lost. Perhaps you could review the CD-ROM file system specification in the Roxio documentation. Your lost message file names may be longer than the file name limit allowed. Or the directory hierarchy may be deeper than Roxio allows. Or the problem could be a combination of the two.

        Message Saver can be configured to limit the length of the message subject (which will be included in the file name) to a specified amount. The default is unlimited. You will need to take into account the 10-11 character suffix in each FML filename.

        I hope this helps.

        Regards,
        Advansys Support

        February 23, 2006 at 5:55 am #8845
        dkallison1
        Participant

          Thanks for looking at this.

          The problem potentially does seem related to file name length. I get an error message from Roxio about the file name length, but then the program offers to truncate the problematic names. I say yes to this, thinking that I will still get all my files. But then when I review the results, I find that many files are missing. The only guess I have is that once truncation is done, perhaps some file names that were not the same become the same, and either overwriting occurs or some files aren’t transferred. But I haven’t taken the time to analyze in detail what files are missing.

          I had hoped there might be a more easy workaround. Do you know of a CD writing program that does not limit filename lengths? They don’t seem to be a problem in XP or with the standard Message Viewer.

          If I can work around this problem rather than solve it, I’ll be happy.

          Thanks.

          February 23, 2006 at 3:56 pm #8846
          Support 1
          Participant

            I would say that resolving this issue will require some analysis of which files are missing.

            It is most likely that the name lengths of the lost files is the problem. CD-ROM file systems have not evolved to match the flexibility of the Windows FAT32/NTFS file systems. Given the current standard in CD-ROM file systems, I think you will find that no CD-ROM writing software can support “long” file names.

            Message Saver does a file existence check when it saves each message. If you specify a subject length limit, the existence check will honour the limit. In addition, Message Saver ensures that a sequence of messages with the same subject will be preserved (with a distinct file name for each message). However, when copying from hard drive to CD-ROM the truncation may, as you suspect, cause the distinctness to be lost and files to be overwritten.

            I would suggest that you investigate the maximum allowed file name length (it may vary depending on the directory depth). Then specify an appropriate subject length limit in Message Saver, taking into account that up to 11 additional characters will be required for the suffix. Then the distinct file names created can be copied unchanged to CD-ROM.

            I hope this helps.

            Regards,
            Advansys Support

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