Synchting 0.14.49 on my QNAP NAS has been throwing a few UTF-related errors recently. Like this :
File name “xxx” is not in UTF8 encoding; skipping.
I’ve noticed that most of the affected characters are é, è, ê and one ç. (Yes, frenchies are in the place ^^)
It does it specifically for a sub-folder of a more global pictures folder. Other files and subfolders of the whole repo sync just normally. I’ve checked in the advanced settings, and autonormalize is set to true.
Auto normalization fixes normalization errors in names that are valid UTF-8. In essence, there are different dialects of UTF-8 and this fixes an issue where a file name uses a different dialect than expected on the current OS.
Syncthing does not, and cannot, automatically fix issues where the file names are not UTF-8 but something like ISO-8859-1 (common for us Europeans).
The error you quote is shown when there are file names that are in an unknown non-UTF-8 format. These files you need to rename appropriately yourself (or using some tool like convmv).
Thank you for your clarification. I’m not very technically aware of the language formats (Unicode, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc). I wasn’t expecting Syncthing to do the job, and I know it can’t. I’ll change the names on the source side and see how it goes.