rsync filling up hardisk on OSX

Michael Fairchild fairchild at corona.physics.ucla.edu
Thu May 8 10:50:56 EST 2003


On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:11:22PM -0700, jw schultz wrote:
> On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 01:41:24PM -0700, Michael Fairchild wrote:
> > Hello,
> >  I am still ironing out the bugs in my rsync backup soloution.  As I said 
> > earlier I have it working working initiating from the macs to the linux
> > server, sortof.  The sortof part is what I am trying to eliminate.  
> > 2 problems: first rsync seems to be filling up the disk on one of my
> > client OSX machines.  df showed a little over a gigabyte when i started
> > the backup of the ~=30GB drive I had a little over 1GB free.  As the
> > backup was running df reported less and less available space untill I
> > finally killed ctrl-c killed the rsync process when there was only about
> > 250MB left.  Now I can't find where all the used space is. Is there a
> > large temporary directory somewhere?  Can I configure rsync to not use
> > so much tmp space, or change where it is?  Where the heck is that 700MB?
> > On another OSX powerbook It seems to be working ok.  But even on that on
> > it seemed to use a few megs, and not clean them up, after a normal exit.
> 
>  From your description i'd say the client (OSX) is the
> sender, yes?
> 
> With rsync, the sender does no disk writing whatsoever.  My
> best guess is that OSX is growing swap space.  I don't know
> OSX but that would be consistent with what you describe.
> rsync is a heave memory user although 700MB is a bit much
> even for rsync.  If that is correct that would be an OSX
> problem, not rsync.  I'd suggest looking into how OSX
> manages swap.
Good idea.  Mac manages swap by allocating 80MB files when it
need more memory.  This accounted for about 530MB in my case.  Mac
unfortunatley does not erase the swap files when they are not needed.
after the laptop was rebooted there was only one swap file.
The other space was the result of a dumb typo on my part :( oops..  I
had accidentally been rsyncing to the local computer somewhere along the
way.
Thanks for the help
Michael

> 
> --> ________________________________________________________________
> 	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
> 	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws
> 
> 		Remember Cernan and Schmitt
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