Case Sensitivity

Our research has found that the majority of business-to-business exchanges expect that filenames are treated on a case-insensitive basis, and we've found in practice that it is very common for the two sides of a business-to-business file transfer to disagree on the case conventions for a filename. For example, many EDI systems use all capital letters in filenames, and many others use all lowercase letters.

As a result of this, paths in Files.com are case-insensitive and accent-insensitive. Case differences and accent marks are discarded when comparing filenames for equality.

For example, Files.com will treat these file names as being identical to each other:

filename.txt

FILENAME.TXT

FiLeNaMe.TxT

FÎŁĘÑÂMÉ.TXT

Fïłèńämê.Txt

This means that uploading FILENAME.TXT to a folder that already contains filename.txt will cause filename.txt to be overwritten by FILENAME.TXT, or FILENAME.TXT to be renamed to FILENAME_2.TXT, depending on how your Overwrite behavior setting is configured. This also applies to any Remote Syncs and Automations that move, copy, or sync, files and folders with Files.com.

Despite being case-insensitive, Files.com is case-preserving, meaning that the path name will use the capitalization and accent marks associated with the original file or folder name.

Our behavior is similar to the default path behavior on Windows, which is still the dominant environment for most enterprises. Our behavior differs from popular "object" storage services such as Amazon S3, which typically use strict binary matching for object names.

When using a Remote Mount, the case sensitivity of that Remote Server is used instead of the Files.com case sensitivity.

For example, a Remote Mount to Microsoft Sharepoint, Box, or Dropbox, will be case insensitive while a Remote Mount to Microsoft Azure Blob, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage, will be case sensitive.

When moving or copying files between Files.com and Remote Servers, whether using Remote Sync or an Automation, be aware that each system's case sensitivity will determine if files might be overwritten, or if folders might have their contents merged, based on their insensitive names.

This issue will only occur when moving or copying files from a sensitive system to an insensitive one.

When connecting to Remote Servers using SFTP, SFTP, or WebDAV, the case sensitivity and unicode sensitivity is determined by the remote server's operating system (OS).