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Forum Discussion
RSYNC: Invalid filenames = stuck files
I'm backing up from a MacBook Pro to ReadyNAS Pro Business using FrontView's backup scheduler and RSYNC. Using User-level access but I don't have any users configured. All shares, including my backup share allow guest access.
I'm using RSYNC 3.0.8 in Mac OS 10.7.3 Lion, installed yesterday from MacPorts (it's been patched to support the additional Mac attributes).
It's all working well except every now and then there are files that cannot be deleted (or otherwise written to) on the ReadyNAS - can't access them from my Mac or from Windows machines regardless of whether I'm using Admin access or not.
Yesterday I removed the backup share to wipe it clean and started over so I could look more closely at any potential problem sources. I saw today a folder in the root of one of the backup jobs called "BPLNDP~7" which immediately rang the alarm bell. I don't keep any files or folders with tilde in their names, so I knew this was a bogus entry. I found that it came from an original bundle file (a Mac OS special folder which acts like a file) called "Bento Backup - 2/2/09.bentodb"
The issue with this original bundle file is most definitely the slashes - they're a path character. Internally Mac OS' filesystem uses colons for path characters, so even though you'd use a slash on the command line, it allows them to exist in filenames. I didn't manually create that file so I couldn't have prevented the use of slashes. Looking elsewhere I found some additional examples.
Another group of files I wasn't able to delete all had accents in the filenames. They looked correct but I couldn't access them from Mac OS nor Windows. The source files on the Mac had the accents all created in a standard fashion, using UTF-8. example: "Filénãme"
So a few questions:
Can I configure RSYNC either on the ReadyNAS or the local daemon running on my Mac to substitute slashes in filenames for a different character on backup?
How can I delete the folders/files that are created in this un-accessible state as part of the backup from the ReadyNAS?
Can I do anything to make sure accented characters are properly preserved and accessible?
I'm using RSYNC 3.0.8 in Mac OS 10.7.3 Lion, installed yesterday from MacPorts (it's been patched to support the additional Mac attributes).
It's all working well except every now and then there are files that cannot be deleted (or otherwise written to) on the ReadyNAS - can't access them from my Mac or from Windows machines regardless of whether I'm using Admin access or not.
Yesterday I removed the backup share to wipe it clean and started over so I could look more closely at any potential problem sources. I saw today a folder in the root of one of the backup jobs called "BPLNDP~7" which immediately rang the alarm bell. I don't keep any files or folders with tilde in their names, so I knew this was a bogus entry. I found that it came from an original bundle file (a Mac OS special folder which acts like a file) called "Bento Backup - 2/2/09.bentodb"
The issue with this original bundle file is most definitely the slashes - they're a path character. Internally Mac OS' filesystem uses colons for path characters, so even though you'd use a slash on the command line, it allows them to exist in filenames. I didn't manually create that file so I couldn't have prevented the use of slashes. Looking elsewhere I found some additional examples.
Another group of files I wasn't able to delete all had accents in the filenames. They looked correct but I couldn't access them from Mac OS nor Windows. The source files on the Mac had the accents all created in a standard fashion, using UTF-8. example: "Filénãme"
So a few questions:
Can I configure RSYNC either on the ReadyNAS or the local daemon running on my Mac to substitute slashes in filenames for a different character on backup?
How can I delete the folders/files that are created in this un-accessible state as part of the backup from the ReadyNAS?
Can I do anything to make sure accented characters are properly preserved and accessible?
2 Replies
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- Just wanted to post a followup to say that the filenames in question are actually named with colons in their filenames (:)
Mac OS APIs translate between colon and forward slash. In the Finder you can use a forward slash in a filename and it gets transparently written to disk as a colon. If you specify a colon it will change over to a slash in finder and remain as a colon on disk.
Any such files or folders will be inaccessible on the ReadyNAS if created there by RSYNC. The only way I've managed to recover is to trash the entire share. Unfortunately a number of Apple-provided (and I supposed some third-party) programs will use slashes in filenames and rely on the file creation APIs to translate. This means there end up being a lot of files that can cause these issues. Thankfully I'm not planning to back any of these paths up and have restrictedly RSYNC backups to my Documents and Images folder hierarchies.
I've done a search for any offending files and have corrected the three I found to remove the colons. Now the only problem remaining is accented characters. - I've posted about this issue in the beta forum as I believe ultimately it needs a solution in the form of an updated firmware, possibly to be able to specify a command line switch/argument for rsync backup scheduling or some other way to set support for Mac OS accented characters. The slash problem can be mitigated on some backups as I mentioned above, but will also need work done by the Jedis to ultimately solve.
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