can't understand rsync's behavior at all

baronsam · 08-13-2006, 07:05 PM

Hello--

After trying to use rsync to do a test mirror of /var/www/ to my backup machine, not only are the files not mirrored, but now I have some where ls -la highlights them in pink, and the attributes are question marks !

I used : rsync -avz -e ssh root@localhost:/var/www/ /var/www/

Any help from an rsync guru would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

--Sam

david_ross · 08-14-2006, 04:43 PM

Well it looks like you are copying from your local machine to the same local path. I'm not quite sure what that is likely to do but it's not what you want to do. Try:
rsync -avz -e ssh /var/www root@backup.server:/var/

baronsam · 08-14-2006, 06:17 PM

Thanks for your reply.
The situation has changed a bit, because my backup machine is down, I'm just trying to get rsync to copy all my files in /home and /etc to an external hard drive, but it keeps giving me operation not permitted errors for many of the files, (not all).

Do you know what that could be due to ?

I'm using : rsync -av /home /mnt/usb80/yoruban_backup/

Thanks,

--Sam

david_ross · 08-15-2006, 12:57 PM

What filesystem is on the usb drive? Can you post the output from:
mount

baronsam · 08-15-2006, 01:19 PM

[baronsam@yoruban baronsam]$ mount
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/usb80 type vfat (rw)

david_ross · 08-15-2006, 01:46 PM

It is probably the permissions that it is failing to save since vfat partitions aren't able to store the posix attributes. You'll either need to live without them or reformat your disk.