Ubuntu – Rsyncing /home between 10.04 and 11.04

So I got this to work , but I still dont know why it failed.

First the .P_248509-A_060.img.CluiPK file that is 0 bytes I learnt is a temporary file. rsync creates these temporary files that it then moves over to the final name.

I figured this out because on a 10.04 box , A similar rsync gave messages saying it could not rename .P_248509-A_060.img.CluiPK to P_248509-A_060.img

I also read this question here where the second answer indicated that the .XXXX files are temporary files

Finally once I knew these were temp files I googled and found this solution on superuser

So replacing my command with

rsync -av /media/hari/MyExtDrive/  /home/MyDFSMountedCIFSDrive/DataBackup/ -T /tmp

OR

rsync -av /media/hari/MyExtDrive/  /home/MyDFSMountedCIFSDrive/DataBackup/ --inplace

The files are copied over accurately and completely.

Now My question is , why did rsync not tell me that it was failing because of some issue with the tempfile. I was confused because it failed silently. I dont know what it is about the source disk or the cifs mounted destination drive that made it fail silently!

Since the home directory on the external disk has it's own partition, that partition may be mounted at the /home/usernme on the SSD's system. Get the UUID of the filesystem on the home partition:

sudo blkid

and use that in a line appended to /etc/fstab

UUID=<whatever blkid output for it> /home/<username>   ext4    defaults        0       0

Replace ext4 in the above with whatever was used (ext3?, ext2?) for the actual filesystem.

On a 10 year old traveling disk, backups should be frequent. Monitor the smartctl -a output for the disk to see if problems are occurring (like the G-sense error rate). An SSD in the enclosure would avoid the mechanical problems, but I've had problems develop after 9 mo. on an encrypted section of an SSD (and you do encrypt the traveling disk, don't you?). Anyway, SSD over USB cannot do TRIM, so you'd need an esata port also and on your home system.