I wish to restore a scientist works from Lacie drives to archive in a library.
There are many drives of this research with thousands of files. About 5 percent have bad filenames. (Colons slashes in filename)

The Lacie Drives Are apple probably "HFS file system. These drives mount okay on my Mint Linux system although the file system is read only for some reason.

My problem is that many (not all) Jpeg files and Photoshop files are corrupted after being copied to a USB drive. ( 2.5" SA external Serial ATA USB3.0 - apparently "super speed".) These brand new drives are formatted as exfat. This is convenient in case some files are greater than 4 gig and also should be readable by other academics on a Windows machine.

I tried copying using rsync, the unix cp command and even python's shutil.copytree. All these methods resulted in jpegs and Photoshop and Word documents being corrupted. I tried a different brand new drive with the same problem.

If I copy by dragging the icon, the copy works okay but because there are unrecognised file names the copy is halted with an error message with the option to cancel or skip. No option to skip on subsequent errors. If clicking on skip, the copy continues but then a little later it halts again on another unlawful file name. It will take too long to copy the many files and drives if it keeps stopping and requiring a click.

It may be the exfat file system that is the problem. Has anyone else encountered this?

These are termed illegal because they are used in code - replace them using a script to remove them - then they should copy across.

However, I would suggest using an external SSD/HDD rather than pendrives, (pendrives are not for long term storage).

Any thing outside a user /home directory will generally be read only for a regular user. That should not prevent a user copying FROM that device filesystem.

The big problem seems to be the filenames. Since you are concerned about others using the files from windows and are using a windows filesystem, maybe you could try borrowing/using a windows computer to do this.

You might find my blog post on troublesome filenames useful: https://centos.tips/fixing-troublesome-filenames/

As far as I know linux doesn't have read write support for journaled HFS+ filesystems and therefore it is mounted read only by default. If the Lacie drives are something other then HFS+ they might be mounted as read only.

As posted the copy problem is due to the destination drive being exFAT because there are DOS illegal filename characters being used on the Mac. linux/unix allows just about any character except for a NULL. As suggest you need to run a script to remove the illegal filename characters and copy.

I don't think Windows will know what the heck to do with a MacOS (HFS) partition, and I don't think Windows is any happier with ":" or "/" in file names anyway.