MacOS accessing files with international characters in their filenames

English Storage
1

I have a large number of music files stored on my NAS. They were copied from a Windows machine using robocopy.

When I connect my Mac (running Tahoe 26.1), I can see the directories I’ve created and the files. However, some files are causing a problem for the Mac and it seems to be related to the file name. It doesn’t seem able to open the file and the Finder “Get Info” dialog is missing information such as the embedded image in the file (which suggests to me that it can’t open the file but can populate the rest of the “Get Info” dialog from the NAS directory entry).

Here’s a specific example: a file named

smb://NAS4._smb._tcp.local/Music/Bach, Johann Sebastian/St John Passion (excerpt), BWV 245 (Brüggen; Bowman)/1 - Bach, Johann Sebastian - Johannes-Passion BWV 245- 7. Aria- Von Den Stricken Meiner SüNden.m4a

The Mac cannot open this file. If (with my Windows PC) I change the “ü” towards the end of the file name to a normal “u”, then the Mac can access it OK. But if I change it back, then it can’t.

I am accessing the NAS using SMB. I tried re-copying the files after changing the Windows code page to 850 from its default 437 but this didn’t work either.

Is there a way to get this to work?

2

This is a known bug in Tahoe. Files with non-Ascii characters in the path cause issues. It is something that Apple needs to fix as far as I know.

3

Hi, please refer to this FAQ:

Why can’t I use Time Machine to back up to my QNAP NAS after updating to macOS 26 (Tahoe)? | QNAP

4

I am experimenting with uploading the files from the PC to OneDrive and then uploading them using the Mac from OneDrive to the NAS. It seems to be working but I’m not finished yet - it’s time-consuming and laborious (~30k files/600GB).