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I've got this scenario: dir1 /home/arek/, dir2 /mnt/home/arek/ (mounted with sshfs).

When I issue: rsync -avz /mnt/home/arek /home/arek, I get /home/arek/arek with the whole content. Some directories are OK in /home, some are not. There are no links (neither hard nor symbolic).

Does anybody know what is going on and how to protect myself?

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2 Answers 2

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rsync(1) is picky about the trailing slash. Try this:

rsync -avz /mnt/home/arek/ /home/arek

See the man page for all the details.

Update

If one of the paths is mounted via sshfs, I suggest using rsync(1) differently:

rsync -avzP -e ssh username@remotesystem:/home/arek/ /home/arek

(The -e ssh might be redundant at this point; rsync(1) used to default to rsh!)

The -P asks for partial file transfers to be restarted (very helpful on network links that might die) and shows progress (which is helpful over network links, since they are frequently slower than drive-to-drive copies).

Furthermore, rsync(1) is very clever about doing hashing checks on both endpoints when invoked this way -- disk to CPU bandwidth is much better than disk to ssh to network to ssh to wonky filesystem driver bandwidth -- so you will be transferring much less data across the network.

Consider: if you append a single byte to every file, rsync(1) over sshfs will be forced to transfer the contents of every single file from the source to the destination. rsync(1) over ssh(1) will instead start an rsync(1) on the remote endpoint and do the hashing computations on both machines as necessary, and will probably only transfer the last 8192 bytes of every file.

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  • yes, it works now ok, but only when I issue rsync from / directory. any lower - does not work
    – Darek
    Mar 26, 2011 at 8:54
  • @tdi, hrm, are you sure you're giving absolute paths to both source and desination? I've never experienced that behavior before, and couldn't understand the implementation decisions that would make it behave that poorly.
    – sarnold
    Mar 26, 2011 at 8:59
  • @sarnold ofc, I give absolute paths. Maybe it is sshfs weird issue. Ill check it later with and w/o
    – Darek
    Mar 26, 2011 at 9:36
  • @tdi, I updated my answer with the knowledge that one of the hosts is remote; rsync(1) can be used much more efficiently than pretending source and destination are local.
    – sarnold
    Mar 26, 2011 at 9:46
  • @sarnold, thanks, I am ofc aware of that, It was just a migration, developers needed to access old server as a direcotry. you know developers, they do not like to learn much :)
    – Darek
    Mar 26, 2011 at 9:56
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It's copying the directory /mnt/home/arek into /home/arek, when what you want is for it to copy the contents of /mnt/home/arek. You can get this behaviour by adding a trailing slash to the source directory name: rsync -avz /mnt/home/arek/ /home/arek. Yes, this is a bit strange. It's documented in the rsync manpage, under the heading "USAGE", but it's not explained very clearly there.

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