RT-AC88U / USB storage / smb File name mangling / Help pls

[euam]

Hi there,

Long time reader, first time poster here.

After years of backing up all my data onto different hard drives I've finally come around and bought a 10TB hard drive to consolidate it all in one place. The Idea is that I hook this hard drive up to my router and sift through years of unorganised data on these long and dark evenings.

The problem now is that many of my folders do not adhere to the 8.3 standard and appear in weird shortened versions that are different to what it displays on my laptop. The drive is connected via smb.

example:

• 2TODWY~X instead of
• 2046 (kar wai wong 2005/chi/eng sub)

The strange thing is that if I transfer one of the affected folders from my laptop (where they show fine) to another 5TB I've hooked up for films and media on the router they appear perfectly normal.
I just can't justify transferring TB of data via WIFI as it would take forever.

I have read the threads here and here but couldn't find any solutions.

If anyone has got any pointers as to how to eliminate the file name mangling via smb on the router, that'd be great.

I'm running Asuswrt Merlin 384.13 on my MacBook Pro 10.14.6

 

[RMerlin]

After years of backing up all my data onto different hard drives I've finally come around and bought a 10TB hard drive to consolidate it all in one place. The Idea is that I hook this hard drive up to my router and sift through years of unorganised data on these long and dark evenings.

Get a NAS instead. Officially, Asuswrt does not support disks above 4 TB. Unofficially, your router doesn't have enough RAM to properly manage such a large disk, and you will have reliability and stability issues.

 

[euam]

Get a NAS instead. Officially, Asuswrt does not support disks above 4 TB. Unofficially, your router doesn't have enough RAM to properly manage such a large disk, and you will have reliability and stability issues.

Understood. Thanks for your swift reply.

I do have a 4tb lying around somewhere that I could utilise. Primarily for the moment this is just an organising exercise. Which still leaves me with the file name mangling issue.

Nas is on the list of priorities ... for next year : (

 

[ColinTaylor]

As explained in the second thread that you linked to the mangling is happening because you are using invalid characters in the filename. "/" is not an allowed character in Windows file names, and therefore also Samba.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits

 

[RMerlin]

Understood. Thanks for your swift reply.

I do have a 4tb lying around somewhere that I could utilise. Primarily for the moment this is just an organising exercise. Which still leaves me with the file name mangling issue.

Nas is on the list of priorities ... for next year : (

If your needs are fairly light (for instance just to store backups), you could look at an entry-level NAS from WD (single drive) or QNAP (dual drive). Personally, in addition to my Asustor AS5004T, I also have an entry level QNAP TS-228A which I use for storing backups from my main four-bay NAS.

Might be worth spending a bit more however to get a better model, like the QNAP TS-253 series. They are a bit more pricey, but that NAS will last you a good 5-7 years without any problem (provided you upgrade disks along the way if you run out of space).

Asustor provide an interesting alternative if you find QNAP a bit too expensive, and have no need for their advanced features. My four bays Asustor is running pretty well, and they are releasing firmware updates about once every two months, the latest major release adding btrfs and snapshot support.