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LTFS illegal characters from a Mac
Hi All,
I’m successfully using an HP LTO5 Ultrium 3000 to archive old projects from our network. But every once in a while a backup will halt because some filenames have illegal characters that LTFS won’t allow (details from IBM here).
I’ve been able to search and replace every illegal character except for ” (a quote). Because when I attempt to search for it in finder, it thinks I’m using the quote as a search parameter, not searching for the quote character itself.
If you have any ideas on how to search several sub folders for a “, I’d love to know. Thanks!
Ben Pohl
bad-pixel.com -
4 Replies
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Use the Terminal:
Find / -name "*\"*"That will locate any file that has a literal quote. If you know the Volume that the file is on, you can replace the “/” with the “/Volumes/DriveName” and reduce the search time by limiting the search to a single volume. You can then rename it by using the “mv” command. Given a file with the name of:
This file has a " character.mov
You would use:
mv This\ file\ has\ a\ \"\ char.mov This\ file\ had\ a\ quote\ char.movYou can use the same technique for any of the “special” characters that LTFS bombs on.
BTW – For BRU users, you don’t need to worry about any of this.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Cool. Thanks Tim.
What does BRU do with those illegal characters? Does it rename them on-the-fly? Or does it not use LTFS?
Now that I know this, BRU is definitely on my shopping list.
Ben Pohl
bad-pixel.com -
BRU has it’s own archive container format (been that way since 1985). BRU actually uses exactly what is in the filesystem. If you used special characters, BRU uses special characters. If you set custom permissions or ACLs, BRU maintains (and restore) those special permissions and ACL settings.
Our tagline is “BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters” and that means that you get back exactly what you put in.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
LTFS uses XML spec 1.0 encoding, which itself can use either UTF-8 or UTF-16. OS X uses UTF-16 encoding for file names, with a few illegal characters. So ” is a legal character in LTFS, but it’s not legal on NTFS. So a decision has to be made whether to encode as is, and substitute on restore; or to either substitute encoding when backing up, or fail. And it seems HP has decided to go with the fail on the front end approach.
It’s interesting they chose to go this route with non-universally supported characters, while with case sensitivity naming conflicts they choose to rename the file (by adding an numer to the body of the file name). Anyway, it appears to be an implementation decision rather than an LTFS limitation.
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