Illegal file names??

haredunbar · #1 May 29th, 2005, 05:25 AM

I have got an linksys NSUL2 networking to a Maxtor USB2 300GB hard drive.

Trying to back up with the bundled Retrospect Express to the hard drive goes well till it halts due to "illegal file names"

Am I going to have to rename all files that contain "/" and other (what other?) "illegal" characters, or is there another way round, ideally without delving too deeply into Linux and command lines, which are in darkest jungle terrirory for me?

btoth · #2 May 29th, 2005, 12:13 PM

How is the drive formatted? FAT32? FAT32 drives also have length limits as well as stricter character limits. If you can, format it is HFS+.

Mikuro · #3 May 29th, 2005, 12:28 PM

You might also want to create a disk image on your target volume, and back up to that instead of the main disk. That way you can use HFS+ names without reformatting. Of course, the files won't be accessible outside of Mac OS X; dunno if that would be a problem for you.

**fryke** · #4 May 29th, 2005, 01:34 PM

Strangely enough, "/" shouldn't be allowed in a Mac OS X file name. Files that you change to have a "/" in the file name, actually show a ":" in the file name if you look at them in the Terminal. ":" is a character that _wasn't_ allowed in Mac OS. Strange things...

What you're looking for, I guess, is a tool for batch renaming, so you don't have to do it by hand. A search for "batch rename" on VT reveals quite a bunch of utilities for you: http://www.versiontracker.com/php/se...t%5B%5D=macosx ...

Mikuro · #5 May 29th, 2005, 03:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fryke

Strangely enough, "/" shouldn't be allowed in a Mac OS X file name. Files that you change to have a "/" in the file name, actually show a ":" in the file name if you look at them in the Terminal. ":" is a character that _wasn't_ allowed in Mac OS. Strange things...

They're considered as colons in "Unix-y" programs that use slashes for delimiters, but they're considered as slashes in Carbon programs that use the Classic-style colon-delimited paths (like the Finder; it accepts and displays slashes as slashes).

This is one reason I'm GLAD the Finder is still Carbon; I use slashes in my filenames all the time (for putting the date in the name of backups, or URL clippings, for example).

haredunbar · #6 May 29th, 2005, 03:58 PM

Thanks for all the above....

I think my preferred route to success will be to create a script that makes a disk image of the files to be backed up and then backup that file as Mikuro suggested.

Not sure quite how to get round the problem that each disk image will have the same name so retrospect MAY not be happy to overwrite without my OKing it....
... but we'll soon find out!

haredunbar · #7 May 29th, 2005, 04:19 PM

Ah...

Unfortunately, my hard drive will struggle to fit a disk image the same size as my home folder (which is what I had wanted to backup).

Plan b?

Unfortunately, the Linksys doesnt offer the choice of HFS+ as far as I can see (it is basically an unix box as far as I can tell)

Strictly speaking, I'm not certain that the problem is "/" but certainly, several files which couldn't be copied contained "/".... but maybe there are other illegal characters??

**fryke** · #8 May 29th, 2005, 05:48 PM

could be. certainly the linux box doesn't allow "/"in file names, since the slash is the path-delimiting character. If you use the slash for dates, just use "-" instead (it's the international way, anyway). Oh, that was Mikuro doing that date thing...

Either way: There might come a day when the Finder ain't Carbon any longer. So you might want to avoid both "/" and ":" in file names.