Experiencing file corruption with Leopard. . .

[Journeyman]

on a MacPro, running 10.5.1, using Quark 7.31 -- when I open and try to re-save a QX 6 file as QX 7, sometimes the file is saved with some extraneous characters in the name and is then corrupt -- it crashes Quark if I try to open it.

I've tried to work around it by copying everything from my QX 6 files into a new QX 7 page, then saved the new files with very short names. For the past few days this has worked well, but it happened again today on a file I created with a name only 21 characters long. Oddly enough, this file -- as some of the others -- was saved just fine with this name, but a second, corrupted file with extra characters in the name, was saved as well but the time stamp for the corrupt file is one minute earlier than the good file. I only saved the file once and immediately closed it. Only later did I notice the corrupt file.

I stopped using slashes and changed to a dash in file names when I migrated to OSX, but does anyone know if any other characters should not be used in file names. The file corrupted today had an ellipsis in its name. Some of the files corrupted earlier had dashes in the names.

So far, I've not had any similar problems with Illustrator or Photoshop files, the only other programs I've used.

If anyone has any experience with this problem I'd appreciate any insight you could provide.

[moggie]

1. What's the filesystem type?

What constitutes a valid filename depends on what kind of filesystem you're using. On HFS+, filenames are Unicode, so you can use pretty much any character you can think of except slash and null: for example, the OS has no trouble with files with Japanese names. If you're using, say, an external disk with a FAT filesystem, the rules are probably different.

What happens if you use a different application (Textedit, for example) to create a file with exactly the same name as one of the problematic ones, on the same filesystem but in a different directory (so you don't overwrite one of your important files)? If that saves ok, and can be reopened in the same application, that would suggest the problem lies with Quark (which is what it sounds like).