GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 347457
Nautilus fails without notification when copying files with similar names from ext3 to fat32
Last modified: 2006-11-06 12:35:23 UTC
Please describe the problem: The issue is that ext3 is a case-sensitive filesystem while fat32 is a case-retentive filesystem. Nautilus doesn't realize that during the copy of multiple files from an ext3 partition to a fat32 partition, two files will be mapped to the same file name on the destination folder. Steps to reproduce: 1. Setup 2 partitions. Partition1 should be ext3. Partition2 should be fat32. 2. Create 2 files in partition1 with the names filetobecopied and FileToBeCopied 3. Using nautlus, drag and drop the two files to a directory in Partition2. Actual results: One of the files will show up in Partition2. Nautilus gives no indication that the other file is "lost". Expected results: One of the files gets copied over. When trying to copy over the second file, nautilus brings up a user notification box giving him options on what to do: A. Abort the copy process. B. Overwrite the first file with the second file, continue copying any other files. C. Give the second file a new name, continue copying any other files. Does this happen every time? Yes (!) Other information: This is a serious dataloss bug for the following reasons: Many external hard drives and removable drives are fat32 for interoperability among Win9x/NT/XP, OS X, and Linux. A user may copy over an entire directory tree from ext3 to the fat32 filesystem, believing he made a backup copy. As for when this would come up for the average user: Many digital cameras (particularly Canon models) assign photos with the name IMG_xxxx (where xxxx is a 4 digit number). Other canon models (and possibly the same camera mounted on 2 different OSs assign photos with the name img_xxxx.
One other thing that increases the severity of this bug: In my steps to reproduce this bug, in steo 2, create the 2 files with similar names in the same directory as a lot of other files. In step 3, drag all the files in the directory to the new drive. You will notice that nautilus silently aborts the process! I got bit by this because I had 2 files in a directory quite deep in my directory tree with similar names. I copied the entire directory tree in nautilus, expecting the entire tree to be backed up. Only when I tried to access the information on another date did I notice that a good number of the directories were not copied over! (Serious dataloss :-( )
Duplicated with Nautilus 2.14.1 copying from ext3 to vfat, also reiserfs to vfat.
The abort problem in comment #1 is described in bug 144726. (I can also confirm this behavior.) This should probably be marked as a dup of that bug.
I also confirm this behaviour on Nautilus 2.14.3-0ubuntu1. I agree that this is the same problem as bug 144726 and should be marked as duplicate.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 144726 ***