Save for previous failed for some unspecified reason

[mbmackman]

This is probably all too late but I was getting that same error while downgrading from 2019 to 2016 for VIs in 2019 that had new instrument driver sub VIs. I would see "path too long" flash really quickly when LabVIEW was trying to look for these sub VIs. One way I fixed this was by saving the downgraded file on a disk drive that wasn't inside a lot of nested folders. I was trying to save to my Dropbox and it kept giving me the permissions error. I saved it to the C drive and D drive and E drive (I have a lot of hard drive partitions) and it saved on each of the drives.

I had another error similar to this for similar 2019 VIs with new instrument drivers. As seen in the attached image.

This was the error I got when trying to downgrade from 2019 to 2016 again. This error wasn't fixed by saving to a base drive path like earlier. I fixed this by downgrading to 2016 one version at a time. I.e. downgrading to 2018, going into the folder created for 2018, finding the new VI, downgrading to 2017, going into the 2017 folder, finding the new VI and then downgrading to 2016.

You probably have all your VIs upgraded to 2017 or 2019 so this might be not that useful now.

[B_Strange]

I appreciate the insight but it turned out to be less laborious to just upgrade the few deployment systems instead of hunting down the source of the issue. Next time (hopefully never), I'll try downgrading one version at a time.

[bmgmelo]

I was having the same issue. It turns out it was also due to a "path too long". This worked out for me. Thank you.

[Kevin_Price]

Since the topic just got woken up again, here's a sneaky old DOS trick for occasions when the path gets too long.   The SUBST command you can issue from a command prompt (or power shell).

Let's suppose you're trying to save a deep hierarchy to a folder with a long path.  Let's say it's something like:

"C:\Users\The Amazing Me\Personal Projects\Software\LabVIEW\Source\Really Super Awesome App That Just Might Change The World\Version 12\Source"

You can map that whole long folder name to a virtual drive letter using SUBST like this:

SUBST V: "C:\Users\The Amazing Me\Personal Projects\Software\LabVIEW\Source\Really Super Awesome App That Just Might Change The World\Version 12\Source"

And now the virtual drive letter V: is essentially an alias to that whole starting path, so now the path to your deeply nested fantastic source code is much shorter and won't cause that path length error.  (I think maybe the path length limit might be 255 chars?).

Some of the options for building source distributions result in many levels of sub-paths -- that's usually when I need to use this trick.

-Kevin P