Potential incompatibilities between '--delete' and --copy-unsafe-symlinks' ???

[Kevin Korb]

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How about if you use rsync's --link-dest instead of cp -al?  Then no
- --delete is needed as superfluous hard links aren't created in the
first place.

IOW, instead of /bin/cp -al /backup/daily.0 /backup/daily.1
drop the --delete and --delete-exculded from the rsync param and add a
- --link-dest=/backup/daily.1

On 08/24/13 18:19, freedman at systems.cs.cornell.edu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> New to this list, but long-time (appreciative) user of rsync. 
> Grateful for any help with my problem here...
> 
> In particular, I've been having long-standing issues (just now
> getting around to trying to resolve them) when I use rsync with 
> '--copy-unsafe-links' alongside the '--delete' parameter.  If I
> use either of these two parameters in isolation (along with other
> shared parameters), I get the expected behavior.  However, when I
> use '--copy-unsafe-links', rsync no longer properly deletes files
> that are present in the destination, but not in the source.
> 
> The usage scenario is rsync (v 3.0.9, stock from Debian Wheezy) 
> getting called by rsnapshot (v 1.3.1, also Wheezy).  Rsync source
> and destination are both on the same host (nothing remote at all in
> this entire scenario), though they happen to be on different
> partitions.
> 
> As typical of rsnapshot, the destination directory for rsync is
> also hard-linked to other directories (past daily/etc snapshots),
> so a typical "new" rsnapshot invocation on my system (to create the
> more recent 'daily.0' snapshot) has the following two key steps:
> 
> /bin/cp -al /backup/daily.0 /backup/daily.1 /usr/bin/rsync -avvv
> --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \ 
> --copy-unsafe-links --exclude=*/.*~ --exclude=*/*~ \ 
> --exclude=/home/lost+found  <... more excludes ...> \ /home
> /backup/daily.0/<hostname>/
> 
> In this above case, files that were deleted on '/home' between the 
> 'daily.1' backup and the 'daily.0' backup (the following day) are 
> still incorrectly present in the new 'daily.0'.  However, if I
> remove '--copy-unsafe-links' (through rsnapshot's appropriate
> configuration file for passing parameters to rsync), then all
> functions as expected, and file deletions on '/home' are properly
> mirrored in the updated 'daily.0' snapshot.
> 
> I've attempted to reproduce this in two ways:
> 
> (1) I've called the above two commands (cp, then rsync) directly,
> on an appropriately prepared identical baseline of past rsnapshot 
> 'daily.<n>' directories.  In other words, this totally removes 
> rsnapshot from the test setup.  I see the same behavior as 
> described above, so it doesn't appear to be an rsnapshot bug.
> 
> (2) I also fashioned a vastly smaller dataset (only a few 
> directories / files, rather than all of '/home'), again calling 
> rsync directly, rather than through rsnapshot.  Alas, in this case,
> I can't seem to trigger the problem.  <sigh> This might be because
> my simpler tests didn't involve multiple partitions, etc.
> 
> At this point, my lack of deeper familiarity with rsync has become 
> apparent to me, so I thought I'd turn to this mailing list.
> 
> Any suggestions / pointers / answers would be wonderful...  Happy
> to provide more info as necessary, but I hope I touched on the big
> points here.
> 
> Thanks so much.. And thanks also for providing such a great tool!
> 
> Best, Daniel
> 

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	Kevin Korb			Phone:    (407) 252-6853
	Systems Administrator		Internet:
	FutureQuest, Inc.		Kevin at FutureQuest.net  (work)
	Orlando, Florida		kmk at sanitarium.net (personal)
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