Avamar (at the time of test) only has a client for OSX 10.4 (Tiger). We wanted to test the Avamar client on OSX to ensure that it could backup the ‘illegal’ folder and filenames seen by the OS. (‘Illegal’ in terms of what other OS’s normally expect – we actually wanted the files to be moved to another fileserver – that’s another story).

For example – the sample set of data is:

drwxr-xr-x 3 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:40 ⢠ALL FILES â¢
drwxr-xr-x 4 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 FONTS?????
drwxr-xr-x 2 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 DIRECT_LB | DIRECT
drwxr-xr-x 4 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 RANGES07:08
-rw-r----- 1 camerons camerons 74321 Feb 12 12:42 lanyard 1 ???.jpg
drwxr-xr-x 2 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 New_Change27:3

Obviously, some of the filenames above are fine – but some are a little wacko. The restore operation completes – but in the test the restored folder was not visible in the finder – only via terminal. Restart of the osx vm was necessary (the finder seemed to hang and I couldnt restart it) and then the restored files were visible. This could be a quirk with the ‘hacked’ osx vm.

Note that also the terminal shows some folder names as including a ‘:’, whereas in Finder they would appear as ‘/’ – for date format names. This is another quirk I suppose.

In summary, the Avamar client for OSX works as expected, even taking into account the non-standard filenames.