For the last year or so, I’ve had two 1tb external USB drives, one attached to a winPC at work, the other to a MacPC at home. I kept them synchronized with rsync over ssh, and had silently been bemoaning the lack of consistent support for extended characters. Lots of “file vanished” type errors.
Recently, the USB drive at home started ejecting itself; seemed like a sign of impending overall failure, so I went and bought a replacement drive, 2tb ’cause it was on sale. When I got it home, I had to reformat it before the Mac could write to it (in fairness, the box did mention this, I just didn’t read the box), so I went with journaled MacFS. Today’s sync is taking extra time because it’s finally started successfully transfering the files with embedded extended chars, ala “Bj\#224rk”. All this time, I assumed the problem was poor character set support in the mac version of rsync, turns out it was more of a FAT filesystem problem. Learn something every day.
Or maybe rsync just discovered a new way of duplicating files. d’ohwell.