Windows Server NTFS volume list file name encodings and any illegal file names

Posted by benbradley on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by benbradley
Published on 2013-07-02T15:50:26Z Indexed on 2013/07/02 17:07 UTC
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I'm having to deal with a Windows Server (NTFS) file server and our backup application appears to be failing with certain files.

According to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Internals NTFS apparently supports file names encoded in UTF-16 but according to their support team, our backup application only supports UTF-8. I'd like to confirm whether this is actually the problem by seeing the file name encoding for myself.

The files that are failing appear to be using plain English A-Z letters and other ASCII characters. No accents or non-English letters etc. I suppose even though the letters appear to be plain A-Z the file name could still be encoded in UTF-16.

Does anyone know of a utility or script that can recursively go through all files in a directory and show the encoding of the file name?
Then I could try renaming to UTF-8 to see if the backup can proceed.

I'm not a Windows developer so can't write this up myself. Presumably the encoding of the file name should be stored in the FS somewhere and therefore it should be possible to expose this.

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