I'm trying to sync some data on an ext3 partition with a FAT32 hard drive. The hard drive is being retarded whenever a filename or directory name is ALLCAPS. (I'm not sure whether punctuation or spacing or anything affects this). In other words, it will try to convert ALLCAPS into allcaps (lower case), which is how it is written on the FAT32 harddrive. In otherwords, README.TXT becomes readme.txt.

However, I have rsync set to delete files in the destination that are not on the source. So when I rsync, it will find readme.txt, which isn't in the source, because that file is actually README.TXT. It will delete it from my destination hard drive, which is bad.

This problem is documented here: http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync...ch/008814.html This person suggests mounting the FAT32 partition with -o shortname=winnt. That's not an option for me though, because SuSE automatically (and dynamically) mounts my hard disks without this shortname=winnt option. Nor am I willing to hack the /etc/fstab files and the udev permisisons. If I try mounting as root, I don't have permission to write to the destination hard drive as a normal user. If I try synchronizing as root, I think I might mess up some permissions when I sync the data. What can I do?

If you are not willing to make some sinple changes to fstab (hacking is way too important a word to use for such a simple and easy task) look into the possibility of telling rsinc to be blind to uppercas/lowercase diferences. (in many apps there's an -i flag that will do this).

You will probably find that rsync-ing files from a Linux source to a FAT32 destination will lose more than just upper/lowercase distinctions. FAT32 has no idea about file permissions either.

There is no fstab entry that points to this device. It is automatically mounted by SuSE. I'm not sure how. Something with UDEV and HAL, I believe.

Is there a way to force my reiser4 or ext3 partition to be case-sensitive in fstab? I can see this possibly causing some problems--if there is a way, would you recommend it?

As far as I can tell ext3 and Reiser as implemented by linux are always case-sensitive. You wouldn't happen to mean case-insensitive. No idea though if it's possible and not ot all sure if it'd be a good idea.

I think the only cheap hack I can do is write a script to run rsync twice. That way, after it deletes the folders or files the first time, it can restore them in lowercase the second time. Of course, this doesn't preserve the true filename, but it does preserve my data. Also, as the second rsync should have minimal changes, this might not work too badly.