I am using ubuntu 11.10. I have several files and folders in a particular folder. The list of files and folders in that folder is shown below.

I have backed-up all these folders and files into external hard-drive. I used rsync command to do the back up. The command I used is 'rsync -av --progress --size-only [source] [destination].

Below is the list of the files and folders copied into external hard drive.

The information on each file and folders that I copied into external hard drive is not the same. The first column, second column, and fifth column seems do not preserve all the attributes corresponding to each files. For example in fifth column I can see some folders have value 4096 and 48. This is not consistent with the source folders.

My question: Is this normal in doing files and folders back-up? Or, is there something wrong the way I transferred the data. Or something else.

I don't want to loose any data from my external hard drive. Could anyone explain what actually getting wrong here?

Many thanks in advance.

well from the man page:

did you run rsync as user or root, or as a different user then on your directory?

i typically will run rsync -aviS source destination, but that is just me. when i do that as user, i never have permissions issues as you did above.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi,

using '-a' should mean that you get the '-p' behaviour and hence preserve permissions, but we can see that the group and other permissions are not preserved. The fifth column should be the size of the files. So the fact the the directories show "0" is quite strange. Have you actually checked the files?

What file systems are you using?

Also you may find it useful to run rsync with a high level of verbosity and check what is written to the terminal.

Another point is, that I think you should probably not use the --size-only option as it would cause rsync to skip modified files if their size is unchanged.

Evo2.

1 members found this post helpful.

What filesystem is the external drive?

Dear evo2,

When I check the contents of the folders and files, they are present as in the source files and folders. But their attributions are also not consistent with the source files.

In Ubuntu I am using ext4 file system. But my external hard drive file system is NTFS.

What is your advice on this could be?

Regards

ntfs won't store all the file 'bits',
either format ext4, or use tar

Dear Firerat,

My external hard drive file system is NTFS.

At times, I may plugin my external hard drive into Windows7 machine.

Thank you


Regards.

Dear Firerat,

In the case of using 'tar', can I use compress option in rsync? Is that same or similar like using 'tar'?

Rgds

compression with rsync is only during transport
i.e. compress file > send to dest > uncompress

It actually depends on how important the permissions are to you,

as it stands the only really difference is you have no 'group' or 'other' bits set
You will still be able to read them
.. Sorry just noticed you lost execute on make-directory.sh


Other options are partition the drive up into two
one ntfs and one ext4

You could also make a loopback filesystem, i.e. one bigfile, 'format' it ext4 and mount with loop option.

end of the day it is probably easier to use tar

optionally use compression ( see man tar for details )

But as I said earlier, it really depends on what these files are used for.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just to clarify, the files themselves will be the 'same' it is just that extra information normally stored by the ext4 filesystem will be missing

Hi,
OK.
Avoid NTFS (and similar deficient filesystems) like the plague.

Cheers,

Evo2.

Sadly NTFS will cause these issues. Not much to be done about it other then not use it. Either split the drive or just deal with the permissions issue caused by the lack of control provided by NTFS