Hi all,

i use rsync to backup some of my files to an external (USB) harddisk. As the external harddisk is formatted using VFAT, doing chown on the copied files would fail.

How then can i stop rsync from doing a chown after copying each file. I already do not have -o or -g set, but still get error messages like these during rsync:

i must add, though, that its just a minor inconvenience as all the files still seem correctly backed up (i hope!).

My rsync command is:



TIA and Regards,
Edwin

It's the -a option to rsync that's causing the problem. That means --archive which tries to preserve permissions, ownerships, group, symlinks, etc. ... things that the destination VFAT filesystem doesn't understand.

Try "rsync -rtL" instead.

FYI, running "man rsync" shows that -a is just shorthand for -rlptgoD. Look up each option and you'll see that VFAT will have problems with the -lpgoD part. Replace -l with -L, take out -pgoD, and that's how you end up with -rtL. I haven't actually tried this on my own system, but simply reading the manpage leads me to this -rtL suggestion.

If you need to preserve the things we're omitting above, don't rsync to a VFAT destination. Alternately, you could roll up your source files into a tarball and copy the tarball to your VFAT destination. You lose all that nice rsync functionality with the tarball method, but you can at least preserve your permissions and ownerships if that's required.

1 members found this post helpful.

Right! How silly of me! Thanks haertig!



Regards,
Edwin