I’m not sure if this is the proper forum to ask this question but I feel the need to. My backup scheduled is always interrupted by a Windows error indicating that the file names of Sentinel 2 images and/or associated files were too long for the destination folder ( just 1 level directory in an external hard drive). Has this issue been resolved or has anyone encountered this problem before and how did you resolve it?
Does the issue affect ONLY Sentinel-2 Level-1C products generated before the 6th of December, 2016? If so, the naming convention prior to that date were causing issues due to Windows OS restrictions on path length (a limit of 256 characters). See News item from 29 November 2016. Products made available after the 6th of December 2016 are distributed in the Compact Naming Convention, and therefore should not cause this issue. You can find information on both conventions here:
Other than that, I wonder of your external hard drive address is contributing to the 256 character lengeth limitation? I put my data at rrot on my C drive,
I have used only S2 L1C images obtained before December 2016 so I assume it’s a Windows limitation. Changing/shortening the file names before .SAFE seems to work but not all the time. It may also have to do with file system formatting. So far, moving files from C:/ to a partition (F:/) which are in NTFS seems to work. But moving files from C: (NTFS) to external HDD (in FAT32) is problematic. I managed to move Sen2Cored subsets but not the whole scene. The process generates an additional error that the file is too big even though I’m moving just 4.5 GB to a 1 Terabyte hard drive. I have limited computing resources, so storing the data in C is not optimum.