rsync: Please add an option to ignore vanished files

[John Van Essen]

Having not yet seen a response to this, here's my $.02...

On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> The following request was received from a Debian user; could you
> comment on it?  I think this seems reasonable, although the cron
> output can be fixed by writing to a temporary file and using grep -v.
> (The temporary file is necessary to avoid discarding the exit code,
>  although that may not be needed in the case of rsync, since it writes
>  that to stderr).
> 
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 02:28:50PM +0300, Cyril Bouthors wrote:
>> Package: rsync
>> Version: 2.6.6-1
>> Severity: wishlist
>> 
>> I make nightly backups of 1TB+ of data that are continuously
>> read-write accessed and I constantly have *huge* output of the cron
>> job because of vanished files:
>> 
>> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_003323885e425f2a67e69e0ac4c24124"
>> (...)
>> [skipped tens of thousands of lines]
>> 
>> I'd like rsync to provide an option called '--ignore-vanished' that
>> would not display those warnings anymore and not exit with value 24
>> ("Partial transfer due to vanished source files" according to the
>> manpage).


Instead of attacking the symptom, attack the problem.  You are backing
up temporary files that are not needed on a restore.  These "vanished"
messages actually help pinpoint directories whose contents should be
excluded, in this case via --exclude=/drbd/var/www/tmp/*

Also, if you want, you can also check the exit code within a script and
treat value 24 the same as a 0 (e.g. no extra warnings about failure).

    John Van Essen