Attention, posible case sensitivity clash

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
1

Hi,

We are running Nextcloud (10.0.1) on a Ubuntu 16.04 server.
We are quite diverse in using it (Apple, Windows 7, Windows 10, iPad)
I also guess that some users are using the old Owncloud sync software.

But on my system (Win10, version 2.2.4 (build 2)) I’m receiving the following errors in the sync software:
Attention, posible case sensitivity clash with…

Looking into my file system and the webapp I see: 0802_Something.pdf vs 0802-something.pdf

What is the best practice to resolve this kind of messages? (and isn’t is possible that Nextcloud is handeling this automatically in the future?)

2

I understand why NC flags it, since Windows doesn’t handle case-sensitivity properly while Linux does.

I’m not sure NC will do anything because it could be potentially changing two legitimately different files identified by upper and lower case if it did.

1 Like
3

Another thing: Linux, Mac OS and Windows not only have case sensitvity difference but there are also a different set of valid characters for each filesystem. On Mac OS for instance it’s not possible to save a file with : in its file name while its perfectly fine for Linux.

Edit: This basically means that the server/client has to rename the files to a common supported character set. That’s the reason why the - and _ are treated as the same character (it seems).

This is the main reason btw why Mac OS and Windows are unsupported as server

4

This was the main reason why I’ve been swiched from a Windows platform as server to an Ubuntu server. As long all the clients have the save character set you are fine. But it wend horribly wrong when there came an active Apple user to the cloud.
Your solution is correct. Incorrect files can be renamed, but you need to do it on the web interface; it can’t be done on the client computer self.
I think the sync client can improve here by correct the character set and by not stopping the sync on an error. But the correct setup (Nextcloud 10, Ubuntu) with Gigs of data and thousands of documents and Win and Apple clients seems to be work quite good.