How can I make my drive support paths longer than 260 characters?

While CBFS Connect allows you to configure maximum path and filename lengths, this does not necessarily translate to support for longer paths by the applications using your virtual drive. Unfortunately, many Windows have the MAX_PATH constant hardcoded to 260 characters (as it was defined in the OS, and in the Windows SDK), and it cannot be changed without an application's original developer recompiling the application with support for longer paths. This is therefore an issue that CBFS Connect has no control over.

With this in mind, a common follow-up question is: "what's the point of being able to configure the maximum path and filename lengths in CBFS Connect?" The reason for the existence of such properties is that Windows allows applications to explicitly open files with long paths using special semantics, and applications that support this feature can consequently use paths up to 32K characters in length. There are situations wherein you may not be able to support such long paths (e.g., perhaps your drive's backend storage doesn't support them), so CBFS Connect allows your virtual filesystem to advertise its own limits so that the OS, and such aforementioned applications, know how to work with it correctly.

Additionally, recent versions of Windows 10 make it possible to enable long path support for all applications (even those which don't use the special semantics mentioned above) using special mechanisms built into the OS itself. (Though this still won't help applications that rely on a hardcoded MAX_PATH value, since they won't try to use longer path names in the first place.)