I have been trying to get rsync to work on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop. I initially used "Back in time" which looked great (I am a little CLI phobic) but after a period of time (which seems to vary) the whole system grinds to a halt (grey windows, unresponsive - you know, like what happens on Windows!)

I thought it might be the GUI getting in the way of rsync, so I bit the bullet and with some help managed to set-up a basic rsync transfer from the CLI and the same thing happens. It just seems to get to a certain point and everything goes dark.

How can I debug and fix this? I'd really like to get a backup script working well so that my "mission critical" data is safe!

Any help would be gratefully accepted.

How many files and how big ?.
Local backup or across a network ?.
How much memory do you have ?.

Try a smaller selection of files and see if it works - after the initial sync, the updates should (hopefully) be small and the problem will disappear.

Few thousand files, around 3-4GB in total.

Local backup - I've tried to another partition on the same drive and to a USB flash drive as well as an external hard drive.

4GB laptop - only 18/12 old.

Will do. Why would it get stuck in some directories and not others? Could corrupted files be causing the problem (these are archives that I haven't used for >12/12)?

I think that perhaps some of the files that rsync is getting stuck on a corrupt. I had to restore from a zip backup a few weeks ago and it is possible that some of the less frequently used files aren't working properly.

I have tried nautilus and cp just to copy those troublesome directories and the whole system freezes.

Is there a utility that can scan my directories for errors/corrupt files?

You could try fsck, but really it should be run from the install/rescue disk, so its not being accessed by anything else.

Should it matter that the partition in question is NTFS?

I don't have access to a rescue disk at work, so I will try it when I get home. Thanks for your help.

PS I have since successfully rsync'ed about 9.5GB data from my home partition to a third one, some the issue does seem to be with my data or my data partition.

I don't think fsck (or chkdsk run from Windoze for NTFS) will help. Those utilities are for validating filesystem consistency, not the individual files contained within.

Short answer, unless the archive tool has CRC or somesuch embedded I think you're out of luck.

Having not solved my problem with chkdsk and fsck I would have to agree. I think - for whatever reason - parts of my partition are unreadable, obviously files that I don't use much but keep for archive purposes. They seem to crash rsync/back in time, but they also crash fileroller, openoffice, nautilus even cp (at the CLI). I think a recent reformat led to some errors, so after trying a defrag on Windows, I think my next move will be another reformat.