Crashes maybe due to: "error writing 4 unbuffered bytes"

[Trevor Marshall]

I have been trying to implement  Mike's tutorial on backup with rsync, but
my server has kept crashing in the middle of the rsync transfer.

I am backing up  /dev/hda1  to  /dev/hdc1 on a SuSe v 7.3  i386 box

Server crashed 8 times. 16 fsck and 8 reboots later I finally got an error
message and a graceful exit from rsync. Somewhere in the middle of the
crashes I compiled and installed the 2.5.4 stable version.

Here is the error dialog:

building file list ... done
var/log/httpd/
var/log/httpd/access.combined.8sep02.log
var/log/httpd/access.combined.log
var/log/httpd/error_log
rsync: error writing 4 unbuffered bytes - exiting: Broken pipe
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(464)
rsync: error writing 70 unbuffered bytes - exiting: Broken pipe
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(464)

A search of Google Usenet showed two identical incidents in June 2002.

Is there any hope of my resolving this without  too many more crashes?

Sincerely,
Trevor
http://www.TrevorMarshall.com