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Forum Discussion
Home share sub-folder copied itself, relies on copy
Firmware 6.4.2
In the last week or so, I have had a regularly used sub-folder ("Expense Reports") in my home share duplicate itself, with the copy cryptically named "EQ5GJE~Q".
So I had two folders in there: "Expense Reports" and "EQ5GJE~Q".
I could use my Expense Reports folder just fine, but the other I didn't really dig around in.
This morning I deleted the "EQ5GJE~Q" thinking that it was just a copy, but when I did that, my "Expense Reports" emptied as well. I should've copied elsewhere just in case, but I didn't. Snapshots also weren't enabled on the Home share, but I can get most of the data back from elsewhere.
Question is: What is this oddly named copy of my folder from? Why was the real folder name dependent on it?
6 Replies
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Are you accessing on a windows PC? If so, which version of winodws? Are you mapping the share to a drive letter?
Back in ancient times, Microsoft only supported 8 character folder names. When they fixed that, they generated a "short" file name from the longer ones for backwards compatibility. SAMBA (the SMB engine in ReadyNAS) also can generate similar names for backwards compatibility. This is called "name mangling".
It looks like you are seeing both the regular name and the mangled name for some reason on the NAS. If so, its actually just another name for the same folder - which explains why the contents disappeared from both when you deleted it.
Yes, mapping as my J:, from a Windows 7 PC.
I'm familiar with the old 8-character naming limits... from 40 years ago.
Wouldn't it have been "Expens~1" though, instead of random "EQ5GJE~Q"?
Anyway... question remains WHY am I seeing this? How do I fix it?
Thanks.
shadowIT wrote:
Wouldn't it have been "Expens~1" though, instead of random "EQ5GJE~Q"?
There are a couple of different name-mangling algorithms out there, I'm not sure which one is used by the current SAMBA.
shadowIT wrote:
Anyway... question remains WHY am I seeing this? How do I fix it?
That is the right question of course. It's unusual behavior (I haven't seen it posted here before). Hopefully someone from Netgear will comment.
There is a way to turn name-mangling off in SAMBA, but not in the admin gui or SMB-PLUS. So it would require ssh access.
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