Backup with UTF-8: Windows -> Cygwin -> rsync -> FreeBSD -> ZFS

I backup my windows box to FreeBSD/ZFS using rsync.

In windows I use cygwin/rsync client.

Works well enough. The problem is filenames with international character sets do not make it into backups.

Has anyone got this to work? There are problems at every step. Right now my cygwin doesn't seem to support UTF-8 (when you do ls, it shows those files as ????.ext).

For rsync I believe --iconv argument will need to be set.

How about ZFS? Is that Unicode compliant out of the box? Or how can I configure that?

Thanks.

Budric

Posted 2011-03-01T19:33:28.673

Reputation: 128

Are you using Cygwin 1.7? That does support UTF-8, and it actually defaults to it. – ak2 – 2011-03-01T20:49:05.093

Answers

I usually operate the other way around.

Mount a windows share on the FreeBSD box then run rsync locally between the mounted and backup folders. Seems to handle extended (even Japanese) characters ok.

Majenko

Posted 2011-03-01T19:33:28.673

Reputation: 29 007

Thanks. Do you use samba to mount the windows share? Any configuration required to make samba work with UTF-8? – Budric – 2011-03-01T20:36:00.960

I use mount_smbfs to mount it locally (part of base installation): mount_smbfs //user@server/sharename /mountlocation /etc/nsmb.conf contains the authentication details. – Majenko – 2011-03-01T20:38:36.927