I've been using a Synology Diskstation DS209j to backup data via rsync. However, the locale on my laptop (the source of the backups) is de_DE.utf8, and on the Diskstation no such locale (in fact, no utf-8 locale at all) is available by default. This becomes a problem as soon as you're dealing with file names containing "non-standard" characters such as German umlauts. Here's what I did to remedy the problem, largely based on a very useful howto at : log in to the Diskstation as root cd /volume1/@tmp uname -a # in order to find out what system you're at, and which tool chain to download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/; mine was wget $the_url_found_in the_previous_step tar -xzvf $the_file_thus_downloaded cd $the_dir/$the_dir cp libc/usr/bin/locale /usr/bin cp libc/usr/bin/localedef /usr/bin cp -r libc/usr/share/i18n /usr/share mkdir /usr/lib/locale localedef -f UTF-8 -i de_DE de_DE.UTF-8 # or en_US en_US.UTF-8 if you so wish locale -a # should now give you more than C and POSIX vi /etc/profile # add: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 export LANG LC_ALL reboot #done