Useful info on cross-platform file-naming
If you add Linux-based network disk storage devices to your home network, for example the much loved “SLUG” (a.k.a NSLU2), you are probably going to have to find out something about how the file-naming systems in Linux work, compared to Windows or Mac OS X. Otherwise, when you copy files back and forth between your various disk drives, you may find your files are getting renamed in strange ways as they move between disks.
It used to drive me nuts when I copied my iTunes music to an NSLU2 to serve to the Roku SoundBridge in the lounge, as some mp3 files got renamed, and as I was always adding new tracks, the problem kept reappearing every now and then.
This is a good short overview to what characters to avoid if you want to avoid unplanned renaming in a mixed environment.
If you going to use “foreign” (i.e. non-english, such as ö ä ü é ç) characters in file names, then things get more interesting, as you will probably have to fiddle around with your “locale” on one or more machines, so that your character encoding is identical on all machines. This used to drive me crazy when copying iTunes music libraries between Mac and Linux servers (file names with foreign characters kept changing in the process), and I only got my problems completely fixed by replacing my NSLU2 with a secondhand Mac mini, which turned out to be an excellent move, as the Mac mini is much faster than the NSLU2 as well as fixing my character mapping problems.
Don’t let the above remarks put you off adding network storage. I wouldn’t want to do without it, as the small file servers save you firing up a PC to run a music or video server… just be aware there may be some points which need attention if you use unusual characters in file names!