Just missing a random pile of files on the desktop.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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What is this "desktop" of which you speak?
Is that what's under all these files?
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Hmmm yeah. But most of it lives in an automatic cloud backup as well.. Photos, important documents, game saves, programming projects. I've lost drives before and apart from one or two moments where I couldn't find a very specific file I didn't really miss anything. The only things that I really do need to backup at the moment are my music projects and the raw files from my photography
I find myself having too many nested folders, and I’m just a normie. I wonder how deep they go for you tech people.
At some points, Windows won’t let me change the file name because it was too long and I’m assuming the file path to it plus the ridiculously long name (“person last name, first name - type of document (purpose) yyyymmdd”) just breaks Windows.
Sometimes I have to copy those files to my desktop just to rename the new file, so that I can upload the file to an online system that only lets me upload files with names under 42 characters long. It’s wild.
You can enable long names in Windows, essentially removing that restriction and giving you the power of all the sub folders up to something like 26'000 characters.
- Open the Registry Editor.
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
- Find the LongPathsEnabled DWORD value, double-click it, and set its value to 1
- Restart your computer
- Be free and happy
That sounds like something my organization would have restricted access to.
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This was one of the reasons I quit trying to develop on Windows way back when. I had a very well organized system of subfolders for all my code, and it was literally running into some kind of path length limit trying to import deeply nested dependencies in certain projects. This was WELL into the era of 64-bit computing, absolutely no excuse other than Microsoft taking shortcuts.
I still run into this issue when one of my company's clients requires developing on Windows. Doesn't take many subfolders before node_modules just starts breaking.
There are lots of reasons I hate developing on windows and that's certainly one of them.
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