IO error encountered - skipping file deletion

Jacob Levine rsync at jlevine.oiiiio.net
Wed Oct 6 05:43:52 GMT 2004


Hello list,
 I'm posting some info here hoping it might help some others. I searched
around a bit before I guessed (correctly) at the cause of my problem.

I'm currently using cwrsync (rsync 2.6.2) to backup data from a Windows
XP machine to a Windows 2000 machine. Unfortunately the boss won't let
me use Linux here. My process worked fine for at least a month but
recently had started to refuse to automatically delete anything on the
destination drive. 

The command I am now running is:
rsync -av --delete --exclude=RECYCLED --exclude=RECYCLER
--exclude="System Volume Information" --exclude="big.zip"
192.168.1.21::buffalo160 /cygdrive/f/ >> c:/logs/cwrsync/stdout.txt

The only reason I noticed that it had stopped deleting files was the
error at the top of the stdout log. With two -v flags it read:
opening tcp connection to 192.168.1.21 port 873
receiving file list ... 
[receiver] expand file_list to 131072 bytes, did move
done
IO error encountered - skipping file deletion
delta transmission enabled
...

I was mystified as to what had changed that was preventing files from
being deleted (I still don't know. Maybe a change from FAT32 to NTFS?).
More annoying was the fact that my log wasn't telling me the cause of
the IO error. The most common IO erorrs experienced by rsync using
people seemed to be permissions related, but I didn't want to change the
permissions on the 2,000+ files on that drive.

Eventually I discovered that the sending machine also keeps a log (if
you instruct it to do so in rsyncd.conf) and this log led me to the
problem: I needed to add "RECYCLER" to my list of files to exclude. Now
my rsync happily deletes and my hair has begun growing with redoubled
vigor! Thank you cwrsync!


--Jacob Levine


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