Suppress rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred

rsync

I get loads of warnings when backing up my running Postfix and Courier server files like:

file has vanished: /var/kunden/mail/username/name@mymail.de/tmp/courier.lock

How do I suppress those warnings from rsync when running it from Cron /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly?

Can I somehow exclude those dirs?

/var/kunden/mail/*/*/tmp/

the tmp folder can be deeper as well, for example:

file has vanished: /var/kunden/mail/username/name@mymail.de/.Presse/tmp/1353871473.M716135P32214_imapuid_36.test.de
file has vanished: /var/kunden/mail/username/name@mymail.de/.Presse/tmp/courier.lock

Best Answer

You can use rsync's exclude switch (--exclude):

$ rsync -avz --exclude '**/tmp/' source/ destination/

Specified this way --exclude '**/tmp/' will ignore any path which includes the string /tmp/. You can provide patterns to this arguments as well.

Example

$ rsync -avz --exclude '/path/to/*/tmp/' source/ destination/

Will exclude on paths of the form: /path/to/*/tmp/.

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I figured it out in the end. I noticed that the reason it was listing everything was because I was using the -a flag.

I'm syncing to fat32 so something about the -a flag was causing it to try to sync all the files every time.

I changed the flags to -tr and that solved the problem. I don't know what it was about the -a flag that was causing it but I know that fat32 isn't as detailed as other files systems and file comparisons don't always work properly between filesystems as a result.

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Error 23 is defined as a "partial transfer" and might be caused by filesystem incompatibilities, such as different character sets or access control lists. In this case it could be caused by files in /home that begin with a . and are thus marked hidden.

In this case you could try something like:

rsync -avz --exclude='/*/.local' /home/me/Maildir ssh root@ipaddress:/var/vmail/me/Maildir

The verbose argument -v should actually give you some sort of list of the problems.

Best Answer

Example

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