Error backing up, restoring or displaying foreign language characters in NDMP plugin (4046144)

Date: May 08
Product & Version: NetVault 8u2 and up
OS Version: All
Module & Version: NDMP Plugin 7 and up
Application version: N/A

Symptoms:
When backing up a filer that contains data stored with foreign language characters (umlauts, accents or even entire Multibyte or Unicode character sets), you might see problems browsing the savesets (replaced characters or cut off strings in the GUI) as well as restoring them (truncated file names restored to the filer, directories skipped after an Umlaut occurred in the restore request, errors restoring attributes)

Reason:
Backing up Unicode or other foreign language data stored on a filer through NDMP is not trivial. It is dependent on the operating system that hosts the NetVault server and the language the filer volume is set to. The only way of ensuring the correct setting is used for your filer is to try a backup and restore of foreign language data.

Additionally, the NetVault GUI is not Unicode-enabled. Consequently, in order to display the file names correctly in the GUI, NetVault needs to translate them into the correct code page. Therefore, configurations are possible where the data is not displayed correctly in the GUI, but backup and restore work as intended.

Ensure that you are using the latest NetVault and NDMP plugin versions (i.e. NetVault 8u2 and higher and NDMP Plugin 7 and higher), as older versions have code issues in the same area.

- When adding your filer, ensure that you tick the "Use UTF-8 conversions" option.
- Configure the NDMP Plugin to use the correct local codepage for UTF-8 conversions. For this, right-click on the "NDMP Client" node in a backup window, select "Configure" and enter the correct local codepage for "Codepage for UTF-8 conversions" on the "NDMP Backup Configuration" tab.
- When creating a backup job, ensure to always tick "Request Unicode File Information" on the "Backup Options" tab.

All three of the above combined usually result in successful backups and restores that also display correctly in the GUI.

A list of acceptable codepages can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding. For example, in order to be able to display German umlauts you would specify the entry "ISO-8859-1" in the plugin configuration.