Disk syncing: what disk formats are supported?
 

I currently sync OF between two computers via a thumb drive (one PPC on 10.4 and one Intel on 10.6, if it matters). Today I got this error:

Unable to synchronize database with server.
Unable to read document.
Unrecognizable transaction file name “2010~105.ZIP”; should contain a date separator of “=”.

I'm assuming that this is because (I just realized) the thumb drive is formatted to FAT16 (I could have sworn I reformatted it and not to that, but that's what Disk Utility says so I guess it's true). The weird thing is, though, that I'd been using this same drive, syncing every day for two weeks, without this issue.

My question boils down to: what are the recommended/supported disk formats when syncing to disk, and can we get an informative error message when trying to sync to a location which will break OF's storage format?

Hmmm... as far as I know, we're using standard cocoa stuff to read/write. If OS X can handle the file format, I wouldn't expect it to matter beyond that. If we try to write to the disk and get an error back from the OS, we'd say something at that point...

<pause for a bit of google searching>

Okay... I think I have an idea of what happened. According to [URL="http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2337747&tstart=105"]this thread[/URL] on Apple's support forums, fat16 and fat32 treat the entire path to the file as part of the file name.

I'm guessing that the path to that specific zip file went over the 255-character filename limit in fat16. The disk truncated the name, so when we tried to read it, you got that error.

Upshot: if you reformat the flash drive as NTFS, this won't happen again.

I don't know enough about how flash drives work to know if we dropped an error message on the floor or if flash drives just silently write the file out with a different name. It's probably best to assume the worst, so I'll write up a feature request on checking the file system of the disk we're syncing to and offering a warning or something. :-)

Thanks for letting us know about this!

I'll write up a feature request on detecting the file system and warning about