School sysadmins everywhere will know this problem. You go to back up or copy some folder where pupils have been storing their files. The error you get is “the path is too long” and you check and find the path is longer than 256 characters. Now it so happens that many older APIs in Windows work with this limit (actually 260 characters). However many years ago the Windows 32 bit API was updated to allow paths of 32768 characters. So the fact that the API can use these long paths is reason enough that the Windows Shell (that is, Windows Explorer and the other GUI components that make up the basic desktop functionality of Windows) should have used them by default. Our only workaround is to either use some third party tools, some of which are command line that you have to try to remember the syntax and switches for, or reconstruct paths in Explorer using the \\?\ prefix which forces a switch to the 32768 character path length API (and then you have to remember the special syntax for that). I want Windows to automatically allow the 32768 character length when browsing ordinary folders and files in Explorer, by default, and in other parts of the shell. It’s high time that it did.
