The MR data on network drives at our institute were recently migrated to a new server. After the migration, recon-all in freesurfer fails to complete. The issue is that freesurfer generates files with the extension ".area", including lh.area and rh.area, but the .area extension is forbidden on the server and the files will not be created.

Has anyone ever had issues with an .area extension? Are there any possible workarounds to change the .area extension used by freesurfer?