I just got an external hard drive and want to start backing up my data properly and I really like backup2l -- it's easy to use and does compressed, incremental backups which is great, but I just did a full backup and it produced error messages for every file with a special character in its name, even just things like accent marks. I'm trying to look into the archive to see if the files made it in anyway, but since it was a 300+ gigabyte file it's taking a long time just to view the contents and my assumption is it wouldn't have thrown those errors if it archived those files right. (I'm using Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit if that makes a difference.)

So, assuming it didn't back up anything with a special character in the filename (for instance, a large amount of music that I named/tagged with Musicbrainz, which uses accent marks when necessary), does anyone know what I can do? It seems impractical to rename every single file on my computer with a special character in the name, but I like everything else about backup2l. If there's no way to make it work right, is there another command line backup program that's as full-featured as backup2l but also reasonably easy to use?

This error messages are really warnings. You can steel restore the files with their correct name using command backup2l -r.
See this bug report: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index...12&atid=424167 for details.