Symptoms

In a remote backup log (or local backups on osx or linux), you see messages like:

• INFO: Marking file as deleted: C:\Users\Someuser\Documents\Somefolder\some incredibly long, very long filename.doc
• ERROR: 0x20000: The server encountered technical difficulties [78 (0x4E) - File name too long] {eFS:Serv-Trans:2516}

Alternatively, for local backups on Windows, you see messages like:

• INFO: Marking file as deleted: C:\Users\Someuser\Documents\Somefolder\some incredibly long, very long filename.doc
• ERROR: 0x20000: The server encountered technical difficulties [123 (0x7B) - The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.] {eFS:Serv-Trans:2502}

Cause 

This occurs when a filename is more than 240 characters long, the file is backed up, and then is subsequently deleted. The backup attempts to 'mark' the file as deleted and prepends a deleted date to the filename, but the file-system storing the backup data does not support filenames longer than 255 characters and thus returns this error. 

Solution 

For remote backups, please contact technical support and ask them to manually delete the file(s) that it is failing to mark as deleted.

For local backups, use windows explorer to browse to the local disk backup destination folder, and manually delete the file from the backup data set. For example, if local disk backups were storing data to G:\MyBackups, you would use windows explorer to look for the file in a directory like:

G:\MyBackups\brandid\accountnumber\FolderName\data\SubFolder1\SubFolder2\some incredibly long, very long filename.doc