Error when backing up files with umlauts & special characters in the name under Linux

Files or folders with names containing umlauts or other special characters may not be backed up. In this case, the encoding in which the file was created does not match the encoding that is set during the backup process. Errors of this type are listed in the backup error log files (dsmerror.log). Example entry from the dsmerror.log file

06/20/2020 11:18:31 ANS1228E Sending of object '/backup/Link to File2008.pdf.lnk' failed 06/20/2020 11:18:31 ANS4042E Object name '/backup/Link to File2008.pdf.lnk' contains one or more unrecognized characters and is not valid.

You can find out the type of encoding as follows:

Save the file names of the folder in question (in the example /home/test) recursively in a file (in the example filenames.out). With the command “file filenames.out” you will receive information on the file type and thus the encoding.

root@username-PC~: cd /home/test
root@username-PC~: ls -R > dateinamen.out
root@username-PC~: file dateinamen.out

If the output of the latter command

ASCII text => does not contain any special characters, no problem, the locale set for the backup is virtually irrelevant
UTF-8 Unicode text => all files are utf-8 encoded. A UTF-8 locale can be set for the backup, which is standard for most modern operating systems
Non-ISO extended-ASCII text or ISO-8859 text
The folder contains file names that were not created with an ISO-encoded code page (e.g. files created under Windows, CP850)

Simplest solution: Change file names in consultation with the user. Other solution: Try setting the following locale before starting the backup software (this has worked in tests):

root@username-PC~$ export LANG="de_DE"

root@username-PC~$ export LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro
root@username-PC~$ local

The output of the “locale” command then shows the following:

LANG=de_DE
LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE"
LC_TIME="de_DE"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE"
LC_PAPER="de_DE"
LC_NAME="de_DE"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE"
LC_ALL=

There are also detailed documents from IBM on the subject of backing up files with special characters.