@ncw In my script to accelerate copy / sync, I indeed use rclone lsf; no problem expected with linebreaks and other strange filenames, as per your explanations of the encoding.
FYI - My next step is allowing tar files as local source. With multiple 10+ GB tar files, I cannot do daily uploads of the entire archives to the remote backup solution. Instead, I intend to tar --list --verbose archive.tar the local files and rclone lsf remote: the remote files; then identify which files require upload (based on timestamp and size); then extract (only) modified files from the tar archive and upload them. This works, except for strange filenames that are differently encoded by tar --list and by rclone lsf.