Hi,
as a happy new unRAID user, I would like to share my experience of moving some gigs of music and movies the past couple of days.
A lot of the files have non-English characters, like ñ in Spanish or ø in Norwegian.
As suggested in the forums and the wiki, I decided to use cp command from the console for speed reasons. After copying, I wanted to check that everything had been moved. First I did an ls command on the console, and a lot of text rushed over the screen, looked promising. Then I used my alternative browser, FreeCommander, which also contains a synchronization tool. I was very surprised when all the files turned up as missing in target. Looking in the ordinary explorer part of FreeCommander, I could see them. Very strange. So, I did a compare using SyncBack and got a totally different result. SyncBack reported that most of the files were in the target, but I discovered quite a few files missing - and then whole directories missing.
A closer inspection showed that all files and directories containing Norwegian characters æ, ø and å had not been copied. Files with Spanish, Portuguese, French and German special letters were copied, but the letters had been replaced with an underscore.
My next step was to go to Windows Explorer to copy the missing files. Bug surprise again: No files in the target directories! After some investigation, where FreeCommander gave me the clue as it shows the Attributes, it turns out that the cp command turns on a the Hidden flag and the System flag on each and every file, resulting in all files being invisible in Windows Explorer.
I managed quite easily to change the attributes with the chmod command, but when I realized how long it would take me to correct all the underscores and manually copy the missing files, I decided the far easiest solution was to delete everything I had moved, and use Windows Explorer on the source PC to copy files to the unRAID server. I didn't have any means to take the time on any of my transfers, but my gut feeling is that the difference is not big, and the result turned out perfect with Windows Explorer. You can even start several copy sessions in parallel before going to bed, as Windows does a great job in this respect.
Well this turned into a long post, but my conclusion is very simple: avoid the Linux commands for file operations, as they don't give you the needed language and Windows support. I have been working professionally in the IT industry since 1983, and I have seen the lack of language support from US developers being repeated again and again. Now, as far as I know, Linus Torvald is Finnish, so he should know better...
Hakon
(my name is actually Håkon, but many mail systems still have problems with the å...)
ps. I have updated the wiki description of transfer from network shares to unRAID.