Can you tell me if the boxes include any type of unicode normalization/translation or similar features to deal with the differences between Mac OS X and Windows and Linux with respect to diacritical and other special characters (decomposed vs. precomposed)?

I'm really having a hard time with my ReadyNAS on this. It can't be used as a safe backup destination using RSYNC from the Mac because any filenames that have a slash in them (allowed on the Mac for some reason) will pooch your entire share, leaving inaccessible and non-removable files behind. This would be easy to fix with iconv if ReadyNAS allowed command line arguments for their rsync - they don't.

If you're using SMB from both Mac and Windows, creating accented characters on Windows will leave you with either inaccessible files on the Mac or folder/files you can't see. SMB is precomposed. You can then see them if you mount the volume AFP but you can't use them, including renaming them. Creating such files in Mac OS X, at least when the share is mounted AFP, doesn't seem to cause a problem for accessing them in Windows however, because netatalk, the AFP driver being used by ReadyNAS translates from decomposed to pre-composed when writing.

This leads to a lot of frustration because it doesn't seem to do the translating when READING files that were created in Windows. Not affecting me day to day, but often enough that I will consider dumping this 6-bay ReadyNAS Pro for a Synology model (8 bay is the closest). And I know that will be a HUGE PITA in terms of getting all the files moved.

Mac OS X does not allow / in a filename. However OS 9 and before did. What OS X does is in the Finder show a /, but on the actual filesystem, it is set to :

My use of rsync may be different though. I use it either on my Mac pushing to an offsite ReadyNAS over SSH, or from ReadyNAS to ReadyNAS still over SSH. Never seen it create unremovable files.

As for the rest, someone else will have to answer. Filenames in any of my shares that allow both AFP and SMB are pretty much all normal english characters. No accented ones, no unicode ones. I think my time working in very mixed environments has me trained to use safe characters only.

You're right, about the slash. I use that and colon interchangeably, since at the UI level one is represented by the other in the filesystem. The issue I mentioned is still the same though.

You'll find that some apps, by default, create folders with slashes - which gets colons at the disk level. Bento is one example. I don't use it regularly anymore, but I had some data from previous sessions. When these ended up on the ReadyNAS they could no longer be removed. I might have been able to telnet into the ReadyNAS and remove them from there, but I didn't get around to trying that. They could not be removed by Windows nor Mac OS, so I had to blast the entire share from the ReadyNAS control panel. Thankfully it was on a backup share.

Accented characters are an issue for me because I deal with customer license files that have accents, stuff friends in Europe send me and of course song titles on MP3 and FLAC files.

Getting rid of all the accents, and not using them going forward, would be a far greater compromise than dealing with the maintenance when issues happen. Thankfully it's not often. But it does prevent me from using rsync from the NAS. I can probably initiate on the Mac where I can use the command line to put in the proper iconv arguments. But that defeats one of the big features of the ReadyNAS, which is built-in backup scheduling. Thankfully I rely primarily on Time Machine for my backups - I just like also having an additional one or two backups of the really important stuff. I suppose I can segment the super-important stuff to a hierarchy where no accents or specials are used.

If you have R/W access to the ReadyNAS system partition, then just replace /bin/rsync (or whatever the exact pathname is) with a shell script wrapper that adds the needed args.

I *think* there was a reason I haven't done that already. But I can't remember anymore.

I'll look into it again, but for now it's not much of an issue, since I have very little space left on the ReadyNAS. I'm trying to purge a few things, but I think I'm going to have to do something to expand my available storage sooner or later.