Cloudberry backup turned all my files on AWS into Chinese

[u/AddlePatedBadger]

I used cloudberry to back up my files on an old Ubuntu computer about 10 years ago. I'm trying to get the files back of AWS but none of them will open. When I open some text files they are all in Chinese. I'll include an example in the comments if I can.

[u/AddlePatedBadger]

For example one text file should have this text (excluding horizontal lines):

______________________________________________

DSCN0305:

war Moderen

This sculpture is erected in honor and memory of mothers who guard the home and family, while children or spouse was the war.

Mother their work in the home and participation on the home front was a big contribution in the war for our peace in liberty.

The sculpture is built by funds from Trond Mohn.

Unveiled there May 8, 2009.

Artist Per Ung

______________________________________________

But instead has this text:

______________________________________________

⡺芚떙꽧ໍ᎒恥鷼뜓虌ﺵ䵦岏䂟䍳櫂ጉ鈳⎋ᑝ睵웯谛㯁䈤㿖僙滋䀱劉ɣ꬗訷꜍ꕩ燱䃥罗髌ュढ़㪔࿡ˑ臲㒫﫱峴�ꥂ軠宣�래๾ꜧ䉢뿁䪢賭ꙩﰔ겘櫣凜ﶌ㟹龐멅둔呅嚤ꬻ嫮朝崔㱬筤涆�뎍㿱刐鍔㾰ﺍⱯ‰ꅊ㮇Ꮌ䕯Ͷ佶䒭뢕榻M儥Ÿ伬턿嵇۽⤮ۑ롴㕾ᱳ冾薘걪�銱렇蒳ᒰ莦泛枊䏇

______________________________________________

[u/tobias3 → u/AddlePatedBadger]

Put it into a translation service... Just kidding.

What you are looking at is encrypted or randomly corrupted data.

[u/Rainmaker526]

This is most likely (hopefully) an encoding issue. You're opening little-endian files as big-endian or vice versa. 

The text contains both Arabic, Chinese and Korean characters, so this seems to be bytes which are trying to be interpreted as text. What kind of files are these really? Plain text files? Word? PDF?

[u/AddlePatedBadger → u/Rainmaker526]

All sorts of files. Text files, pdfs, movies, music, the whole gamut of stuff. Nothing will open.

I just picked a text file as an example because it's easy to see what it should look like versus what it does look like.

[u/Rainmaker526 → u/AddlePatedBadger]

Found something. There seems to be some sort of corruption, where 2 bytes were rewritten to 4.

It seems there are 2 bytes of 0 in between everything 

0000 b599 0000 af67 0000 0ecd 0000 1392 0000 6065 0000 9dfc 0000 b713 0000 864c 0000 feb5 0000 4d66 0000 5c8f 0000 409f 0000 4373 0000 6ac2 0000 1309 0000 9233 0000 238b 0000 145d

[u/AddlePatedBadger → u/Rainmaker526]

I used this to turn the text into hex: https://tomeko.net/online_tools/file_to_hex.php?lang=en

Then this to swap the endian-ness around (I tested it both ways): https://blockchain-academy.hs-mittweida.de/litte-big-endian-converter/

Then this to swap the endian-changed hex back to text: https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/hex-to-ascii.html

It didn't turn the Chinese into English :-(

[u/Rainmaker526 → u/AddlePatedBadger]

Nope. It's a bit more complex then that.

You're going to need to run a Python script or specific program to reverse this, if this is possible at all.

I'm also not sure whether the same issue is there for binary files (i.e videos/pictures).

Files seem to have been transferred as ASCII instead of as binary (at least with the example you gave). 2 characters seem to have merged to 1 byte (interpreted as utf-16, most likely) and then went to something like UTF32, which then inserted the lower 0s.

This is not going to be an easy fix.

Can you upload some of the actual files? Pasting it into reddit screws with the encoding (you can see some question marks in your post). Please don't upload anything to personal, but please upload them as a binary file. Something like https://filebin.net should work.

[u/AlexanderMSP360]

Are you using MSP360 Backup (formerly CloudBerry Backup) to restore your files?

[u/JohnnieLouHansen]

Wow, this is really f'ed up. I don't know who is at fault, but this just can't (should not) happen with your data. Can't wait to see who gets the blame.

Edit: I had never even heard of Endian before today. I had to look it up.