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smackmick
Known Participant
February 5, 2026

Path naming issues in Windows 11 prevent Dreamweaver from seeing files.

  • February 5, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 23 views

Very strange issue. I found some files on the remote server do not show up in Dreamweaver.  When I look with Explorer, the files are there locally.  But they have a strange path with \\?D:\ on the front.  The files that do show up do not have the \\? on them.  

I can see the files on the remote server, but cannot sync them back as I get an ftp error.

This is probably a Win 11 issue but no idea how to report this.  I wish Dreamweaber could see these files.

This is somewhat new, as I had been able to sync in the past.

What do I do?

    1 reply

    B
    Community Expert
    Ben MCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 5, 2026

    This article should help explain why windows uses a path like that: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-path-formats .

     

    What is the specific FTP error you are receiving? I wouldn’t think with a file at that location you would need FTP since although the files are not on your computer a networked drive would not require FTP access and could just be a local/network drive transfer for the file sync.

    S
    smackmickAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 5, 2026

    This link did not answer at all why I have a leading \\? on three files, this is not a standard format.  Something is wrong but I have no idea how to fix it.

    The issue is that Dreamweaver cannot see these files at all on the local computer.  If I try to reverse ftp them in Dreamweaver then I get a nebulous error, no information just that it cannot do it.

    I am not sure how many of these I have, but none will show up on my web tool I use to populate the production server.

    S
    smackmickAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 5, 2026

    Actually I did find something in this link:

    DOS device paths

    The Windows operating system has a unified object model that points to all resources, including files. These object paths are accessible from the console window and are exposed to the Win32 layer through a special folder of symbolic links that legacy DOS and UNC paths are mapped to. This special folder is accessed via the DOS device path syntax, which is one of:

    \\.\C:\Test\Foo.txt \\?\C:\Test\Foo.txt

    Not sure why Win 11 thinks these are dos files, they are not folders, so still something wrong here. 

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