I am in the process of transferring my data from a Synology NAS to my Unraid server. I transferred all of the data and by chance noticed that I have some files on the Synology array that have special characters in the filename which when transferred to Unraid got converted to some other character. The character appears different depending on what OS I view it from. On MacOS it looks like a slash, in Krusader on Unraid it looks like a square with lines inside, and in Windows it looks like a character-sized rectangle. I'm not sure what it really is, but it's not what it was on the Synology file system. 

 

An example of where the special characters in file names came from is renaming music files with MusicBrainz Picard, but I have some other files that have special characters in names also. 

 

I've tried mounting the Synology shares as Unassigned Devices and copying the files with Krusader, transferring them with cp, mv, and rsync through SSH, and several other things - all with the same result. I've read every post and article on here and StackOverflow about rsync parameters and tried them all (--protect--args, -iconv, etc.) The end result is still the same. File system on Synology is BTRFS, Unraid is XFS. 

 

Is there a way to get these files from Synology to Unraid without the filenames being modified in the process? 

It might have something to do with the Language that the device that wrote the original file was using.  If the 'Language' of the system that is trying to display the file name does not contain that character, It will default to a predefined 'symbol' (like the ones you  have described) for any undefined character.

Edited February 11, 20224 yr by Frank1940

36 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

It might have something to do with the Language that the device that wrote the original file was using.  If the 'Language' of the system that is trying to display the file name does not contain that character, It will default to a predefined 'symbol' (like the ones you  have described) for any undefined character.

 

Some of them were originally written by the same Docker containers that I'm trying to read them with now. I'm running a MusicBrainz Picard container from the Unraid app store, for example. I was using the Synology as storage for my Unraid server. The Synology shares were mounted through Unassigned devices. I tried converting the "language" using the -iconv parameter of rsync but it didn't change anything. 

Try archiving them at one end and extracting them at the other.