Hi,

I'm trying to backup an ext3-formatted disk to an external USB disk, also formatted in ext3.

rsync repeatedly reports those kind of errors : rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "<filename>" : Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character.

Following Google, this is usually related to NTFS-formatted drives but it is not the case here.

A lead to the solution could be that the folders and files being backuped are mapped through smbd. My smbd.conf file contains the following lines regarding charsets :

#Dos charset = 850
#Unix charset = ISO8859-1

Since those lines are commented out, I believe this defaults to UTF-8.

Can anyone help ?

Thanks !

Matthieu

Rsync is for network use (the 'r' bit), and imposes a cpu loading. I gather you are working locally. There are backup programs, and good old tar, cp -a & friends to make this easy. Why 'split the atom' with rsync when you can do it a better way?

And on top of what business_kid said I'd like to understand what
your smbd.conf has to do with a local rsync problem?



Cheers,
Tink

As I said :

So the files stored in those folders are exclusively coming from Windows machines.... Just an idea, if you don't mind...

From the CPU point of vue, this could probably make sense. Appart from that, the backup "script" wasn't written by myself and I believe that it originally was meant for backing up to a networked drive. But in any case, I believe that rsync is still a good option because of its versatility (local use is documented in the man page) and it's performance with big folders.

cp would imply playing with find and timestamps files, and tar would create archives which doesn't help when you need to get a file back rapidly.

That said, anyone feeling like to discuss this "multibyte character" problem ?

Thanks.

Does the problem appear for all the files you're trying to transfer or only for some of them (strange characters in their name)? Eventually you can try to convert one of these file names from one encoding to another and see if it is correctly parsed by rsync after the treatment. To do that the convmv command may come in handy, e.g.
Hope this helps.

Only some files with (french) accentuated letters. BUT, as a matter of a fact, I tried to replicate today in order to test the command you suggested and... it seems the problem disappeared...

I don't understand, sorry...

Thanks to everyone who tried to help me on this one...