rsync'ing a directory with nothing but symlinks

Bill Campbell rsync at celestial.com
Wed Feb 17 14:17:07 MST 2010


On Wed, Feb 17, 2010, Gerardo Herzig wrote:
>Hi all. This looks like a common question. I want to backup a dir, in
>which i put some symlinks, so it looks like
>
>machinegun:/tmp/daily_backup # ls -la
>total 8
>drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 2010-02-17 17:41 .
>drwxrwxrwt 19 root root 4096 2010-02-17 17:30 ..
>lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 2010-02-17 17:41 cgi-bin -> /srv/www/cgi-bin
>lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    4 2010-02-17 17:17 etc -> /etc
>
>This is the rsyncd.conf
>[backup]
>path = /tmp/daily_backup
>comment = Dir for backupear
>auth users = backup
>hosts allow = 10.10.8.105
>secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
>read only = true
>
>
>So, when i try to rsync from 10.10.8.105:
>gherzig at 10.10.8.105:/tmp/bkp> rsync -avz  --copy-links
>backup at machinegun::backup .
>receiving file list ... symlink has no referent: "/cgi-bin" (in backup)
>rsync: readlink_stat("/etc" (in backup)) failed: Too many levels of
>symbolic links (40)

Set ``use chroot = yes'' in your module definition above.  This
keeps symlinks intact, and doesn't have any interaction with the
host system.

I normally use the options ``--delete-excluded -aHrxF'' which
preserves hard links, and uses .rsync-filter files to exclude
things like pid files and other cruft that shouldn't be copied.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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