Dropbox Best Practice Update - File nomenclature and characters used.

Hello Team, 

Please note that Dropbox or Applications that access files in Dropbox have certain limitations, two of which I would like to make you aware of. 

1. The Dropbox desktop application can read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters, which means that files will sync to and from those locations, however, the applications used to open or save said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, Etc.) might not support reading from or writing to these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit them. This can result in Syncronisation issues too. 

Issues can occur if there are more than 255 characters in the entire file path. 

As an example if you had a test.txt file in your Dropbox that had the following path:

C:\Users\YourName\My Documents\Dropbox\test.txt

This file would have a path that is 47 characters long.

However if we had too many sub folders then the path could be longer than 255 characters and start causing issues. 

For example a file with a path length as below. 

C:\Users\YourName\MyDocuments\Dropbox\Folder\SubFolder\SubsubFolder\SubsubsubFolder\SubsubsubsubsubFolder\ SubsubsubsubsubsubFolder\SubsubsubsubsubsubsubFolder\ SubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubFolder\ SubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubFolder\SubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubFolder\test.txt

You should be able to resolve or avoid any such issues with your applications processing these files by simply renaming the file to a shorter name, or reducing the number of sub-folders.

2. File naming should not have special characters such as |, &, §,?. Please use _ to represent a space. 

For example 

“Filename_1.doc” instead of  „Filename 1.doc”

In summary please keep naming conventions short and simple. Don't use special characters in file names and please consider how many sub folders you are using in Dropbox to ensure they do now contain extremely long pathnames.

Let me know if there are any questions.