Comment 7 for bug 989496

The problem is with the filename encoding you have. Please check if any files or folders have weird characters that look like these: �����

This is an example in python:
>>> unicode('\x95','utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x95 in position 0: invalid start byte

This seems to work (but haven't tested it with duplicity):
>>> unicode('\x95','utf-8', "replace")
u'\ufffd'

>>> unicode('\xd1','utf-8', 'replace')
u'\ufffd'

The developers could use either "replace" or "ignore", but I don't know which one suits the purpose best. Or even use "try ... except UnicodeDecodeError" and skip these files/folders for that matter.