Home > Storage > ObjectScale and ECS > Product Documentation > Dell ECS: GeoDrive Best Practices > Always use lowercase naming
GeoDrive administrators should always use lower-case characters when creating purpose-built-for-GeoDrive paths and naming schemes. This is important because ECS (and S3) are case dependent. Case dependence means that a file named file.pdf is a different file than one named File.pdf. The Windows filesystem is case independent. This means that Windows cannot distinguish between files that are identical in name except where case is concerned.
If a Windows user creates a file named File.txt, GeoDrive cannot upload it as is. This is because that file may already exist in ECS, but in a different case, such as file.txt. If GeoDrive did not take character case into consideration, two versions of the file would exist in ECS, and one will be chosen at random, to be brought down to Windows when requested by the user.
Before GeoDrive uploads any file to ECS it first retrieves a listing of the folder in ECS to see if the file is there but in a different case. GeoDrive must also consider character case in folder names. GeoDrive works its way down the path until it finds a folder that exists, and then does folder listings on each folder to find the actual path. Significant optimization is built in to GeoDrive to minimize the time spent required to handle differences in character case, however, the impact can still be significant.
Generally, if the users of GeoDrive are Windows users, they may never know about the lower-case option, which is fine. GeoDrive does write files to ECS in lower case and stores the original name case in the metadata. When a file needs to be recreated on Windows, files will be restored using the original filename.