[Box Backup] Non-ASCII location names not working for Boxi and Box Backup

[Achim]

Hello Chris:

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:01:31 +0100 (BST), Chris Wilson <chris@qwirx.com>
wrote:
>> Adding a location with the following settings:
>>
>> Location name: ñ
>> Location path: D:\install\AJL\BACKUPTEST\empty
>>
>> results in the following bbackupd.conf saved via boxi (note the UTF8
>> location name convesion!):
> 
> The UTF8 conversion is deliberate. What other portable encoding could we 
> use in bbackupd.conf? Besides which, Box Backup already uses UTF8 
> internally everywhere. Using anything else would doubtless introduce more
> bugs.

I agree: I was just pointing out that a conversion is going on when writing
to a file.

>> When starting a backup of that location, the following happens:
>> bbackupd.exe: Nothing is backed up, displays the right location name
>> "ñ", but then looks for "ñ" on the file system:
> 
> Where do you see that it looks for "ñ" on the file system? I don't see
> that in your output below:
> 
>> NOTICE:  Beginning scan of local files
>> WARNING: Failed to stat location path 'D:\install\AJL\BACKUPTEST\empty',
>> skipping location 'ñ': No such file or directory (2)
>> NOTICE:  Finished scan of local files
>> NOTICE:  File statistics: total file size uploaded 0, bytes already on
>> server 0, encoded size 0
> 
> Does the path D:\install\AJL\BACKUPTEST\empty actually exist? If not then
> I would expect this error.

Hm, unfortunately, I am not able anymore to reproduce this error, as I
change the test layout in order to accomodate more complex cases.

But as I said in the tracker comment, this turns out to be a bigger
potental problem than anticipated. 

If the top-level directory that is the root of a location has a non-ASCII
character, the resulting Location Name will prevent the data in that
directory from being backed up without any error message in Boxi:

Boxi
====
1. Create directory d:\testdirääääääää and put in a couple of files
2. Adding d:\testdirääääääää for backup automatically results in
the location name testdirääääääää
3. Start backup: There seems to be some activity, and Boxi reports "Backup
Finished"
4. Restart Boxi to make sure that all information is updated (see bug
1569279)
5. Go to restore, and the location does not show up.

Box Backup
==========
Run bbackupd.exe with the configuration created with Boxi in the previous
session works perfectly, as does restore via bbackupquery.exe

Restoring with Boxi from a backup successfully created with bbackupd.exe
works, by the way.

Best regards, Achim