rsync - Aug 2008 - accented characters in filenames mangled when rsyncing to a samba share

Hi folks,

I am having a problem rsyncing files with accents in the names. I've
seen similar problems reported a few times before in the archives but
they didn't seem to be referring to exactly the same problem as what I
have, and I'm not good enough at Linux to solve my problem by
generalising from the information there: sorry.

Anyway, my specific details are this. I am running rsync on a QNAP
TS-109 which is a NAS device running a kind of debian linux. Also on
the network is a Lacie network drive formatted with FAT32, which I
mount from the QNAP using samba. I am trying to set up a regular back
up the contents of the QNAP to the Lacie. The problem is that any
filename which has accents in gets mangled. The files copy across but
the accents are mangled: if I view the files by mounting the Lacie
drive on Windows then the accents appear as the box special character,
repeated between around 10 and 50 times (with the rest of the filename
truncated); if I view the files using ls while ssh'ed into the QNAP
then accented character does not appear at all and the rest of the
filename is truncated.

A further strange behaviour is that when directories contain accented
characters, around 10 or so copies of them are created, each with
varying numbers of the box special character.

I would very much appreciate if anyone could help me with this! I am
happy to provide more detailed information on request.

Cheers,

Ben

-- 
Dr. Ben Kenward
Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden
+46 18 4712125
http://www.benkenward.com

Bump.

My apologies for hassling the list with the repeated question (see
below). Is it ignored because this is an easy problem I ought to be
able to solve myself, or because it is a hard problem no one knows the
answer to?

I have now reformatted the destination drive to EXT3, which I was
almost certain was going to solve the problem, but it hasn't. So I
have rsync copying between two disks which are both EXT3, both mounted
on the same linux system (although the destination is mounted as
smbfs), but rsync (2.6.6) is mangling the accented character
filenames. What could be wrong?

Cheers,

Ben

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Ben Kenward <ben.kenward@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I am having a problem rsyncing files with accents in the names. I've
> seen similar problems reported a few times before in the archives but
> they didn't seem to be referring to exactly the same problem as what I
> have, and I'm not good enough at Linux to solve my problem by
> generalising from the information there: sorry.
>
> Anyway, my specific details are this. I am running rsync on a QNAP
> TS-109 which is a NAS device running a kind of debian linux. Also on
> the network is a Lacie network drive formatted with FAT32, which I
> mount from the QNAP using samba. I am trying to set up a regular back
> up the contents of the QNAP to the Lacie. The problem is that any
> filename which has accents in gets mangled. The files copy across but
> the accents are mangled: if I view the files by mounting the Lacie
> drive on Windows then the accents appear as the box special character,
> repeated between around 10 and 50 times (with the rest of the filename
> truncated); if I view the files using ls while ssh'ed into the QNAP
> then accented character does not appear at all and the rest of the
> filename is truncated.
>
> A further strange behaviour is that when directories contain accented
> characters, around 10 or so copies of them are created, each with
> varying numbers of the box special character.
>
> I would very much appreciate if anyone could help me with this! I am
> happy to provide more detailed information on request.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ben
>
> --
> Dr. Ben Kenward
> Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden
> +46 18 4712125
> http://www.benkenward.com
>


-- 
Dr. Ben Kenward
Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden
+46 18 4712125
http://www.benkenward.com

On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 23:46 +0200, Ben Kenward wrote:
> I am having a problem rsyncing files with accents in the names.
> I am running rsync on a QNAP
> TS-109 which is a NAS device running a kind of debian linux. Also on
> the network is a Lacie network drive formatted with FAT32, which I
> mount from the QNAP using samba. I am trying to set up a regular back
> up the contents of the QNAP to the Lacie. The problem is that any
> filename which has accents in gets mangled. The files copy across but
> the accents are mangled: if I view the files by mounting the Lacie
> drive on Windows then the accents appear as the box special character,
> repeated between around 10 and 50 times (with the rest of the filename
> truncated); if I view the files using ls while ssh'ed into the QNAP
> then accented character does not appear at all and the rest of the
> filename is truncated.
> 
> A further strange behaviour is that when directories contain accented
> characters, around 10 or so copies of them are created, each with
> varying numbers of the box special character.
I have never known rsync itself to mangle names: when it creates files
on the destination, it uses the same bytes returned by readdir on the
source unless you request conversion with --iconv.  Consult the Samba
documentation and/or mailing list for information about how it handles
encodings.  If you know what encoding the network drive supports, you
may be able to fix the problem with rsync's --iconv option.

Matt
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