rsync'd destination much larger than source

John Van Essen vanes002 at umn.edu
Mon Dec 1 12:09:43 EST 2003


Joe,

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, acct svcs <heartofthematter at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> rsync -arvzx --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp --exclude=/mnt --delete
> --delete-excluded -e ssh 192.168.0.1:/  /bkup/rootpart/
> 
> The problem is, if I 'df' the Ensim box, it reports that the entire root
> partition
> is using 3.5 GB of space, however, the rsync'd copy of the root directory
> structure on the remote box is consuming over 23 GB.  Note that I did use -x
> as well as some excludes to ensure that files on other partitions mounted
> below '/ ' were not copied. Initially, my thoughts were that
> symbolic links to directories were being treated as regular directories and
> being copied repeatedly.  This does not appear to be the case, however.

Another factor is preserving hardlinks (-H option), but that won't explain
the large increase.

23 GB sounds about right to me if /var, /home, and /usr are not mount points
but are instead contained on the root partition (mine is 26 GB).  Can you
verify that the mount points are indeed only directories under /bkup/rootpart?

Also, are you sure you read the right column and used the right decimal place
on the df output?  Maybe the source has 3.5 GB _free_, not 3.5 GB used?
-- 
        John Van Essen  Univ of MN Alumnus  <vanes002 at umn.edu>




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