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I recently went through some French language training for work. As part of that, I gathered a lot of worksheets, grammar reference PDFs and other related files that have french accents (é, à, ç, ô, etc.) in their filename. I'm trying to copy those files from my work Windows computer to my personal Mac to continue my training and for long term retention. I've copied them from the work Windows PC onto a USB stick (formatted as exFAT), but when I try to copy from that USB stick to my Mac, the copy fails with error -43.

Here's some of the troubleshooting steps I've taken already:

  1. I can't even see the files with the accents in their filenames when I look at the directory in the Finder on my Mac. However, I've confirmed that the file is there in the directory by plugging the same stick back into a Windows computer. I can also see the files in the directory if I use Terminal and look at the directory contents with ls -la

  2. I tried using Disk Utility to image the stick and it is the same result with the image as it is with the stick. Files can be seen with Terminal but not in the Finder and the copy fails.

  3. I tried using Terminal's cp -R to copy the directory, and while the copy doesn't fail, it does throw and error and the files with the accents in their names are not in the resulting copy.

Any advice on how to fix this other than manually going file by file and removing the accents (which is completely impractical due to the number of files I would have to do this on)? Surely this must be fixable. I've searched Google and not found a solution. I even tried asking ChatGPT 4o and the solutions it gave me were not helpful.

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    Try formatting the stick as NTFS on the PC. The Mac can read that format natively, and you're a lot less likely to have problems with Unicode filenames. Another option is to combine all the files into a single ZIP archive on the PC.
    – Linc D.
    Commented Aug 3 at 2:22
  • Thank you, @Linc D. Formatting the stick as NTFS did the trick and now the files copy to my Mac with no problems! Thank you so much for this response. One note I will add is that tried your second suggested method to ZIP the files in question and that failed. Windows wouldn't let me zip the files with the special characters. So that one isn't a solution. But the NTFS certainly is.
    – aslam
    Commented Aug 5 at 1:58

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I can confirm that formatting the USB stick as an NTFS volume solves the issue. The files copied to an NTFS formatted stick on Windows are visible when plugging that same stick in on the Mac. And then when I try to copy them, it works flawlessly.

A big thanks is due to user @Linc D. for the solution.

P.S. One caution for those in the same situation as I was, I attempted to ZIP the files on Windows and then copy a single zip file that could be extracted on the Mac, but Windows 11 won't zip files with special characters in their filename. It throws and error.

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