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My setup: Windows 7 Pro (locale: Polish) and a NAS drive (D-Link DNS-323) attached via a router. Just recently upgraded from XP to 7. The NAS drive reports an NTFS partition.

The problem I've just discovered: when copying files to the NAS drive, if a filename contains certain characters, such as curly quotes, angle quotes, bullet characters, subscript characters, em-dash etc., only the short 8.3 filename gets copied to the NAS drive. So a file named Abc „def” – ghi « jklm.htm on the Win7 system becomes Abcde~6h.HTM on the NAS drive.

(I would not sweat it if the troublesome characters just got dropped, but what happens is that meaningful filenames are replaced with gibberish as above.)

I use the NAS drive as a backup/mirror location for the local drives, so this is a big issue, since my backups are now severely clobbered. I discovered the problem while testing my backup regime, then found out the filename change occurs no matter how the files are copied - whether it's the backup application, a file manager or just Windows Explorer.

And (of course) the problem did not occur when I was running XP, and nothing on the NAS drive changed since I installed 7 a week ago. Files that were previously copied onto the NAS drive (under XP) still show up fine, which tells me that 7 is actively interfering with the copy operations.

Does anyone know why this happens or if there is a workaround? Thanks a lot in advance for any suggestions.

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Updating the firmware in the NAS device and reformatting it seems to have solved the problem.

I would still love to know exactly what Win7 does with respect to the NAS drive handling, since I the problem was not present under XP SP3, which I was previously using, so the OS must be affecting it in some way.

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    I would guess that the SMB updates in Windows 7 changed some things, maybe the NAS wasn't seen as able to handle long filenames. Glad to know that you were able to fix your own problem though. Aug 26, 2010 at 20:39
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    The NAS was probably running a buggy version of SAMBA. Corrupted FAT32 long filenames might result, and then, you would have the 8.3 original FAT filenames, but not any valid long filenames. Such a problem seems likely to have caused other corruption too, I'd be wary of that NAS vendor.
    – Warren P
    Dec 18, 2011 at 21:42

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