Added extended text encoding options to help with diacritic characters in filenames. Mac users usually use a multitude of these. Using the --iconv option should help reduce the transmission of already-up-to-date files and hence speed up the backup process, especially when creating remote backups using ssh transport.
Added extended text encoding options to help with diacritic characters in filenames. Mac users usually use a multitude of these. Using the --iconv option should help reduce the transmission of already-up-to-date files and hence speed up the backup process, especially when creating remote backups using ssh transport.

From the rsync(1) 3 man page:
--iconv=UTF-8,UTF8-MAC

An example of the latter can occur with HFS+ on Mac OS X: if you copy a directory with a file that has a UTF-8 character sequence in it, say a 2-byte umlaut-u (\0303\0274), the file will get that character stored by the filesystem using 3 bytes (\0165\0314\0210), and rsync will not know that these differing filenames are the same file (it will, in fact, remove a prior copy of the file if --delete is enabled, and then recreate it).

You can avoid a charset problem by passing an appropriate --iconv option to rsync that tells it what character-set the source files are, and what character-set the destination files get stored in. For instance, the above Mac OS X problem would be dealt with by using --iconv=UTF-8,UTF8-MAC (UTF8-MAC is a pseudo-charset recognized by Mac OS X iconv in which all characters are decomposed).


MacLemon/mlbackup