File Names

Different operating and file systems may have different rules for naming files.  In particular, different systems may use different character sets and case sensitivity.  For maximum cross-platform compatibility, SyncDat uses UTF-8 character encoding and assumes that file names are case-sensitive.

Native Windows and macOS file systems are case-insensitive.  This means that a file named "foo" may unintentionally overwrite a file named "Foo".  If you are comparing files between a unix file system and a Windows or macOS file system, take care that there are no files whose names differ only by case.

Some systems reserve certain characters for special meaning and forbid their use in filenames.  For example, the colon ':' is not allowed in native Windows file names.  See the Special Characters section for a list of characters to avoid.

Non-ASCII characters are compared using UTF-8 unicode encoding.  In unicode, it is possible to have characters which look the same but have different encodings: these will not match.  See the Unicode section for more information about character encoding.