Fat 32 Shot in Foot

Typical, late Friday and I'm in a rush as we're off to have a meal with friends. Wanting to clear the decks the final task is to get some digital music from my production platform onto a USB drive for a client. We've done a lot of CD ripping this week so I had nearly 475 Gb of data on my system to be copied across to a USB drive ready to return to our client on Monday. Plug in USB drive, identify folder with clients music, drag and drop onto new USB drive. Shoot off for a curry. Into the hutch this morning, calamity. The folder had been copied but there was a window listing 150 error messages and sub-folders which hadn't been copied over. Tragically simple explanation - my production system runs Windows Vista and the drive is NTFS, which supports long file and folder names, This clients music is mainly classical so we have folder and track names derived from the artist. This is a combination of conductor, soloist and orchestra which generates lost of characters. The USB drive is formatted to FAT 32 with its limitation of much shorter file names. One way round this is to go into each errored folder find the long name then edit it down to a shorter name. This will work but it's hard to be certain you hit every single file. One mistake and you're facing a real mess. The better way to do it is use the Library / Consolidate command from within iTunes to first point from the 'old' NTFS location to the 'new' USB location and let iTunes do the hard work. Which is what the machine is doing now, it's why I am writing this (to remind me to be more careful next time), and why I wasted several hours of processing time last night.