How to prevent long file name error copying from an external drive?

I have an external hard drive with many files (800 GB). I want to copy the entire contents of the external hard drive to my local drive. get many errors about long file name or long file path. Renaming is also not possible because of number of errors.

What can I do about this issue?

You'll get these kinds of errors if you use the drag-and-drop copy within Windows explorer.

However, if you use Robocopy, you should find that you can copy the files without any issues.

The command-line version of Robocopy is built-in to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008; it can be downloaded for other operating systems. Although there is a downloadable GUI, it's best used from the command line (aka CMD.exe).

By default, Robocopy should handle paths greater than 256 characters (there's a switch to turn it off, but in your case you don't want to do this).

Example command line (which will copy all files in the folder C:\Projects to the folder Z:\Projects):

robocopy "C:\Projects" "Z:\Projects" *.* /COPY:DAT /E