Making a backup

A good day. I'va had power and, best of all, water, as you can read in this comment.
I've spent the morning looking for a well-hidden token... I can't recall were did I conceal it. (I think I will surrender and order a replacement for it).

And I've spent the afternoon and the evening preparing a DVD backup of my old-backup CDs. I wanted to make it for many reasons:
a) I've read some CD-Rs last for very few time, even 2 years.
b) I've experimented that on my own.
c) I often need an old document I can't find, and need to navigate some CDs to find it (I have to concede many of these hard to find documents use to be on my Mac IIci hard drive only).

But I've got some problems when copying my oldest gold CDs (burnt by a neighbour before I've got a CD-roaster). This is the problem:

The file RUFIÁN.WPD has the short-name RUFIÁ~78.WPD
(It shouldn't have a short name different of its long name)
MS-(win)DO(w)S "DIR" sees it, but MS-(win)DO(w)S "XCOPY32" or "COPY" gives a
"File not found" error.

I've turned around this problem using a QBASIC program writen ex-profeso, and I've spent the evening writing it. I needed a QBASIC program instead a vb-one because I needed to call the MS-DOS native name without the windows name conversion. So I've made a (not-so) quick and (very) dirty program that interfaced with MS-(win)DO(w)S DIR to get the "short name" and then copied the file using a QBASIC file copying routine (with a buffer of, wow! 1Kb).

But there was a file whose short and long names were identical, and refused to copy. So I have had to startup under BeOS, launch a terminal, and, after a very simple program (using "find -exec" ) to find different files, have copied the file with a single cp command.

I wonder why BeOS (or linux) can manage windows files even better than windows.

I promise you that my neighbour burned his CD with Windows. He used the default burning program provided by Hewlett-Packard with his external SCSI burner (yes, that was when SCSI ruled. USB killed SCSI, and so did UDMA). So, why this CD does have these errors under windows?
Has the use of international chars something to do? Every wrong filename has international chars (ÁÉÍÓÚÜÑ), but most "international" filenames do not contain errors.

The truth is out there.