May be I understand a bit more meanwhile, while this doesn’t solve the issue:
The NTFS filesystem allows path lengths of about 32000 letters. So this is not the limit exceeded here.
But most Windows tools and programs expect length of the full path not to exceed approx. 255 letters. This is limit is caused by the size of the variable the Windows program reserves for the path. That is true for most applications as well as for commands like copy.
It is different for some programs able to handle full length paths like robocopy.exe from Microsoft.
It seems Endnote also is able to handle these long paths.
But almost all programs running in MS-Windows are not.
So each operation with the Literature.data directory created by Endnote is only possible with programs able to handle long path - that means nearly none of the typical programs like ‘copy’ or ‘Acrobat’ etc.
The consequence is: Only Endnote is able to deal with the subdirectory Literature.data
Many backup programs do not expect long filenames. That means restoring Endnote created ‘Literature.data’ from a file-system-backup is not possible.
The way to deal with it:
- Create a compressed library using the Endnote menu command combination FILE/COMPRESSED_LIBRARY to create a single file containing the whole data base and
- let this file be backed up by the back up software.
- Do not expect to restore the original PDF Files from the standard backup
May be someone of the Moderators of this forum might check if my ideas are right … and may be they offer a better solution for the future.