Why can't I use the same name (with different letter cases) for two different folders?

Files and folders with the same name, but different letter cases are treated differently by different operating systems. While Linux reads the same letter in different letter cases as different characters (i.e. "a" is different from "A"), the Windows and Mac operating systems are not case-sensitive. This means that for a machine running Windows or Mac OS, PROJECTS and projects are identical folder names.

While Zoho Docs itself is case sensitive (you can distinguish between files in our cloud storage using only letter case), we conform to the file naming conventions for Mac/Windows when syncing between the cloud and your desktop. As a result, to prevent errors when syncing to your desktop, we recommend that you follow non-case-sensitive naming conventions even if you use a Linux machine.

If not, when you try to sync a folder that has the same name as another folder in the same location, but in a different letter case (for example, test and TEST ), you will get the following error message:

This folder can't be synced since a folder with the same name (but different letter case) already exists. Please rename the folder to sync it to the web.

To resolve this problem, click Rename from the actions menu that appears in the error message.

Zoho Docs will automatically perform the following modifications to folders/file names during syncing. To avoid having your folder/file names changed, keep these rules in mind:

• Spaces at the beginning or end of a file name will be removed while syncing.
• File names which contain only spaces will be renamed as 'White Space' while syncing.
• Unicode characters in file names will be normalized to a standard form. This means that although some special characters can be coded in multiple ways (e.g. "Ä" can be expressed in Unicode as "U+00C0" or "U+0041 + U+0300"), Zoho Docs converts all such special characters to a single standard expression. Most users will not see the difference but it can impact certain advanced programming applications.
• When syncing from the web to your desktop, you cannot have multiple files with the same name in a single file directory. Files with the same name will have a number added to them. For example, if you have two files named Procedures.txt in the same directory, the second file will be renamed Procedures(1).txt. This renaming rule only applies to files that are being synced from the web to your desktop; names of files on the web will remain the same unless the user changes them.