Hello,
I use BackupPC which automatically does rsync on a schedule. I recently set up an outside backup server with which to backup our internal backup server so that we have some redundancy. However, I cannot open any one file that gets backed up to the outside server. All files look to be scrambled when they're opened. I can't open any pictures at all.

The command that it uses is /usr/bin/ssh -q -x -l backuppc (our IP address) -p (SSH port) /usr/bin/rsync --server --sender --numeric-ids --perms --owner --group -D --links --hard-links --times --block-size=2048 --recursive --ignore-times . /var/lib/BackupPC/pc

When I try to restore a file directly within the software it says this:
Did the files all get corrupted in the transfer?
Thanks in advance.

Sorry but how can there be any thought of opening pictures in the face of a clear error you should investigate and correct first like the "Fatal error (bad version): Bad escape character '(network IP address)'" one?.. Plus "%2f" means escaped "/" so how about finding the cause for the "/f%2f" and "/f" as well?

Unfortunately on my internal backuppc server, the folder name that it created was f%2fstorage so the complete path for that folder would be /var/lib/BackupPC/pc/server/0/f%2fstorage. I specified the share name as /storage but that's how the software works behind the scenes I suppose.

Well I did discover one thing: I can only restore files through the backuppc interface. If I try to access the files directly via SSH, they don't open. I'm glad to see nothing went wrong but does this have anything to do with compression and/or encryption? I'm not too familiar with the rsync flags.

I just ran that on my server here,. made a backup and I can access the files normally.

Are you logged in as root? Can you share the output of what you experience when you navigate to the directory and try to cat a file?

I tried with both the root and backuppc user.
I just tried to cat a small file and this is what I got:

x^Á± ±Î'ÅI¤¤ÍÅ¡1$·êç÷åéèÁIöÈÏkÍã*
0Ð]ð7
ñ@TÖмMÂËãTÎ[\eÐ
Ü&Ô÷öQÎRô*ªø&]çÙ
!`

I can download and open the file correctly via the BackupPC interface however.
Is there some kind of encryption I'm using that I'm not aware of?

EDIT: Right now I'm mainly concerned about fixing that error I quoted in the first post. I figure it's okay if the files are encrypted as long as I can still restore them. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix the "escape character" issue? Thanks in advance.
EDIT2: Okay I fixed that error. I found it was user error. I had accidentally added an extra "-e" in the restore command which screwed it up. Is there anyway to disable the files being encrypted though? It's useful to have with the outside server but I don't need them to be double-encrypted.