sorry ignore my post regarding adding write permissions.

the cron is running, but part of it is failing.
the directory stuff/music cannot be opened and so the deletion is failing.
it cant be opened because of a permissions error i suspect

that didn't last long, it gave that 3rd line again

oh yeah - and show the perms for the music folder. thats the issue. i misread earlier

all it has is d then a bunch of dashes, which would explain that error

is there a way i can just have it ignore that error until i can figure out if I can just delete that directory since nobody can do anything with it?

you have to add some permissions before you can delete that directory....or you can just ignore it...send errors to /dev/null
my guess is that someone zeroed the permissions for a reason.

there are some rsync flags which can ignore this directory anyway.

man rsync

looks like there is an ignore errors option in rsync i could use. but the rsync did eventually die with that third line of the error i posted earlier: rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(620)

Should i just have it rsync with the ignore errors?

Since it worked before, I would suggest to verify the drive.
Can you add and delete files by hand?

Verify the entire drive? does that "skipping file deletion" error mean it won't delete ANY files or just one file in particular since the message only appeared once.

I was able to cp a file buried within my stuff folder to the root of the stuffbackup folder.

AFAIK 1 file
However, can' you verify if the changes are made or not?

Not sure I understand what you asked, but if i did, I did a du -ch | grep total on both stuff and stuffbackup, there is a considerable difference between the two.

Would it be of a benefit to run the rsync with a -v -n ? or will the stuff fly by on the screen so fast i won't be able to even see what it says?

I gave it a shot with those 2 switches, but it didn't give me any other good info other than what was already noted earlier.

IO error encountered - skipping file deletion
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(620)

How do i know what kind of IO error is found. it looks like its skipping deleting all files it should delete because of this. Without the --delete working I'm going to run out of space on my destination drive sorta soon.

OK, problem solved kinda. It at least did the deletes on my second hard drive. What I ended up doing was chmod 700 on stuff/music so the user who had the crontab with my rsync would have permission. After I did that, i reran the rsync with -n -v and it was actually telling me it would delete stuff. so i removed the -n -v and what do you know, it did the deletes, but then gave the following messages still. At least I was able to free up the space on my secondary drive now, but why would I still be getting these messages?

opendir(stuff/music): Permission denied
delete_one: rmdir stuff/oldpics: Permission denied
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(620)

the problem is really in the messages itself. just read them then check perms/user on those folders


dont forget to give a thumbs up for me if i have been of any help throught the entire post

Thanks to everyone involved. I'm guessing that third line is more just a summary of the other 2 and i dont need to look into it any more.