[BBLISA] Rsync Backup - The Continuing Conversation...

[John Stoffel]

>>>>> "Richard" == Richard 'Doc' Kinne <rkinne at aavso.org> writes:

Richard> Folks:
Richard> I really appreciate the rsync/backup conversation that has developed  
Richard> here! I appreciate everyone who mentioned the venerable tar, but I  
Richard> decided to try rsync.

Richard> As I mentioned doing an rsync on a MacOS 10.5.6 system from
Richard> an NFS mounted disk to an external firewire drive produced
Richard> copious (and that word is an understatement!) "file vanished"
Richard> errors. I actually did the rsync again thinking that it would
Richard> pick up the files it had not on the first pass that it
Richard> thought were "vanished" but that was not the case.

Can you tell us what the NFS server is and what your mount options
are?  There's something fishy going on here.  NFS is usually more
stable than this, and if rsync is showing up these errors, I'd be
worried about any other tool which trawls the filesystem as well.

Are you using NFSv2 or v3 over TCP or UDP?  I know zilch about MacOS,
so unless you can get a CLI and show thr output of 'mount' I'm a bit
lost here.  :]

Richard> Thinking this could be something to do with my web disk
Richard> structure I rsynced another computer that I needed to back up
Richard> and got the same behavior - at least 40% of the files were
Richard> declared vanished. The only consistent behavior in this is
Richard> that once files started to be declared vanished, it was that
Richard> way to the end of the process.

Again, how was this other computer setup?  Was it an NFS server that
you mounted on the Mac?  What OS/hardware and NFS settings?  Please,
more details!

I bet if you run the following on your Mac, it will also show errors
then:

	tar cf - /path/to/NFS/dir | dd of=/dev/null

The pipe is to force tar to NOT realize it's writing to /dev/null and
just complete quickly.  

Richard> So, it didn't seem to be something inherent in the disk
Richard> structure since I saw the behavior on two different
Richard> computers. The next step was to take NFS out of the equation
Richard> and do an end-to-end copy (as was suggested by a few
Richard> people). This, of course, meant setting up an Rsync Server,
Richard> which I managed. I did a test backup last night and it
Richard> actually looks good. No "file vanishings" and the space
Richard> comparison looks good as well.

Richard> Maybe that's it! However, I'll still be interested in the  
Richard> conversation because I remember at least one person mentioning, "Oh,  
Richard> look, I'm getting  'file vanishings,' too. I wonder why that is?'"

John