getting rid of "permission denied" partial transfer errors

[Jim Salter]

 > The rsync command tries to send sample_file to the backup server,
 > which cannot write it because it was not able to recurse into 
my_directory.
 > Removing the -p switch and removing the backup file did not succeed,
 > and rsync continued to preserve the perms even without the switch. I am
 > running rsync 2.5.5 on debian woody/stable.

Hm.  You apparently missed something when you tried changing the 
switches - if you aren't running rsync with -a, -o, or -g, it won't 
create files or directories as owned by anyone but the user context it 
is running under.  So permissions are no longer a problem, because even 
if a directory is 700, when it's owned on the backup server by user 
backup, user backup can of course traverse it.

chown -R backup /mnt/backup && chgrp -R backup /mnt/backup, rewrite your 
script to get rid of all instances of -a, -o, or -g, then if you're 
still getting errors show us what your revised script looks like.

Jim Salter