Possible illegal Windows characters in backup file names for nextcloud

[gjj22T]

Hello all,

I setup nextcloud backup following the instructions on the OPNsense guide (https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/cloud_backup.html).

The configuration is properly saved and uploaded to the nextcloud server.
I can even download it from nextcloud to a Linux PC, so no problem here.

On a Windows computer, I have a nextcloud client installed.
In this Windows PC I can see the OPNsense-Backup folder correctly created in the synchronization folder.
However I don't see any configuration files in it.

I noticed the configuration file names contain the ':' (colon) character which I presume is illegal in Windows.
Maybe this is the reason configuration files are not synchronized.

So my question:
Is possible to customize configuration file names and have '-' (dash) instead of colons?
If so, how can I do this customization?

Thanks in advance,
Roberto

[fabian]

This will be changed in 20.7.

I am not happy with it as I prefer the : to separate time units as you would write a common time like 17:00.

I did almost all of the implementation of the nextcloud exporter and for that reason I also created a bug ticket for the nextcloud client to take care about local file system restrictions as we are not the only system which can create such files.
You can get simmilar effects if other people are using Linux and use some special file names or characters. The fun fact is that you actually can store those files on NTFS using Linux but if you access that drive with Windows they are not displayed as far as I can remember.
I think this may be caused by NTFS ADS support where Windows is using the : as a separator.

[gjj22T]

I am not happy with it either 

At work we had a similar problem on a software and we decided for the ISO 8601 standard restricted to POSIX portable file name character set (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.2.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r2.bpxa400/bpxug469.htm) with the additional restriction to use only lowercase letters (Windows is case-insensitive).

The ugly thing is that Windows fails without notice or with unrelated errors in such cases.

I am going to wait 20.7 version, then.

Thank you for the implementation and keep up with the good work!

[STRUBartacus]

This will be changed in 20.7.

Nice to hear! 

[0xDEADC0DE]

You could use the fullwidth colon
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+FF1A

I've tested it for windows and it works.
The only problem, nobody would ever know why it works when he doesn't compare the hex values

[fabian]

I think this will break lots of automation scripts or will lead to questions why it is not working