Can rsync handle any type of file?

[Wojtek.Pilorz]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Hamish Robertson wrote:

> Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 22:40:20 +0100
> From: Hamish Robertson <hamish at iskmweboffice.com>
> To: Alex Pedenko <alex at kolosy.com>,
>      Robertson Technologies Ltd <hamish at iskmweboffice.com>,
>      rsync at lists.samba.org
> Subject: RE: Can rsync handle any type of file?
> 
> In technical terms, is rsync capable of dealing with backing up any type of
> file then? In practical terms, has anyone had any corruption problems when
> backing up files?
> 
> Thanks
> Hamish
> 
I had an incident where rsync reliably was giving me corrupted file.
(it was, as far as I remember, version 2.6.6).
The problem was not file contents (it was just a zip file), but
a very unstable network connection on which a smbfs Linux mount was 
used; rsync was used locally (no daemon, no remote rsync) and the result
was that part of destination file was filled with binary zeroes.
As far as I remember the parts with zeroes were at places where short read 
from Linux kernel were returned (i.e. number of bytes read was less than 
requested).

Best regards,

Wojtek