International Chars cause backup problems - FYI

[Joel Rees]

On 2006.3.14, at 02:24 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:

> On Monday 13 March 2006 15:01, Anne Wilson wrote:
>> I have a number of files on my server that have international 
>> characters in
>> their names.  My backups are constantly failing, with errors like 
>> this:
>>
>> Incorrectly encoded string (Soy Loco por Ti, América) encountered.
>> Possibly creating an invalid Joliet extension. Aborting.
>>
>> I could continue trying to find every instance of these characters, 
>> but
>> it's very inefficient.  It seems to me that I have only ever used the
>> character sets utf8, 8859-1 and 8859-15, yet setting kde to use any 
>> of them
>> results in titles with spaces instead of the international 
>> characters.  I
>> presume that only file labels are causing problem - there will be 
>> strings
>> in text documents as well.
>>
>> I've installed convmv, which is supposed to deal with converting 
>> character
>> sets, but it seems to me that the biggest problem is knowing which 
>> files
>> need conversion.  I don't particularly want it to go through the whole
>> drive converting everything unnecessarily.
>>
>> Any ideas how I can ascertain which character sets were used in naming
>> these files, and how to list all files using that encoding?  Or any 
>> other
>> way of tackling the problem?
>>
> I didn't find any way to list the affected files, so I used convmv 
> against the
> folders most likely to hold affected files.  Backup completed and 
> verified,
> so it had nothing to do with k3b or hardware problems - just character 
> sets.
> FWIW, I told it to convert to utf8.

Other than not using Joliet (the most correct answer IIUC) that's about 
what you should do, But, just to check, you do make the conversion 
_before_ the file gets copied, right?