Re: Can't translate pathname 'x/y' to UTF-8

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 11/29/11 12:59, The big chief wrote:
> I got the message below when using "tarsnap -c", but the concerned
> files are correctly stored in the archive:
>     tarsnap: some/path/1411BlumValérie.ods: Can't translate pathname
> 'some/path/1411BlumValérie.ods' to UTF-8
> 
> If I use "tar -c", I don't get the message.
> 
> The files are on an NFS file system.
> 
> Any clue what does it really means?

Depending on how your system handles non-ASCII characters and locales Tarsnap
sometimes fails to convert characters to UTF-8.  This seems to be an issue on
Linux systems in particular.  Tarsnap is storing the path name "raw" rather
than as UTF-8 as a result.

If you restore this file onto the same system you should see no problems; but
restoring it onto a system with a different locale setup could result in the
"é" in the path being turned into some different character.  Either way, the
file should be restored intact; the only issue is what it ends up being named.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid