> Do you know something better than the locale encoding? I don't.
Neither do I, sorry.

>> Can’t each filesystem have its own encoding?
> Yes, but how do you get the encoding of each filesystem?
If I really had to, on linux I could parse the output of the mount command, but this could get messy quickly, and of course is not okay for official Python.

> Backup programs can use the "raw" (bytes) API of Python 3 to avoid
> all encoding issues.
Neat!

> As wrote R. David Murray, read issue #9992 if you would like to know
> more about this problem and the different proposed solutions.
I did so, thanks for the pointer and all the explanations.