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I have two data hard drives on my Linux server and I use second as a backup for a first drive.
I use rsync for that purpose. An example would be:

rsync -r -v --delete /media/disk1/ /media/disk2/

What this does is that it copies every file/directory from /media/disk1/ to /media/disk2/ but also deletes any difference. For example, lets say that files A and B but not file C are on disk1, and on disk2 there is no A and B files, but there is C. The result would be that after the command on disk2 I'd have files A and B, but file C would be deleted, just like on disk1.

Now, a rather disastrous scenario had crossed my mind; what if disk1 dies, system continues to work since system files are on my system disk, but when rsync tries to backup my data on disk2 from broken disk1, it deletes all the files from disk2 because it can't read anything on disk1.

Is this a possible scenario, or is there a protection from it build in rsync?

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  • That's not a backup. If your data is damaged/erased by a virus/software or hardware failure/human error, your command will make sure it's also damaged/erased on the second drive.
    – gronostaj
    Jul 17, 2018 at 9:07
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    This post is old, but I came here thinking about this too. There is a easy way to limit rsync? I mean, if /media/disk2/ is more than 50% different than /media/disk1/, then do nothing.
    – TNT
    Aug 29, 2019 at 18:23

2 Answers 2

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Realistically, in that scenario, the kernel would freak out, and you'd get a bunch of disk I/O errors before rsync deleted anything. But then if you were to reboot, it's possible that /media/disk1 would be empty and unmounted... So...

In your rsync script, just make sure you don't run rsync if there aren't any files in /media/disk1. An easy way to do that would be:

ls /media/disk1/SomeFileYouKnowExists || exit
rsync ....

This will cause the script to exit before running rsync in the case that the target file does not exist.

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  • I once had failure of one disk in LVM setting and server continued to work so I would not bet on kernel halt, perhaps this happens if system disk fails.<br> As for the code you've suggested I backup huge amount of files that change and I can't track all of the changes.
    – enedene
    Jun 22, 2011 at 9:45
  • That's because when a single disk in LVM fails, the other disk(s) can continue to serve data, and the kernel may not notice until it tries to read data from the failed disk.
    – Flimzy
    Jun 22, 2011 at 9:47
  • It also sounds to me like maybe rsync isn't the right tool for your job--you might be better off with a real backup application.
    – Flimzy
    Jun 22, 2011 at 9:47
  • @Flimzy, you're probably right about LVM but I can't be sure will this happen to non-system disk as well, since it didn't happen yet. rsync does the job well for now, that's why I'm asking if there is any danger, if not I'd continue to use it because it's easy and practical to me. I also wouldn't be surprised if more complicated solutions used rysnc in the background.
    – enedene
    Jun 22, 2011 at 9:50
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    Sure, some backup systems may use rsync as a transfer method, but that's not a reason to trust rsync for valuable backups. That would be like saying "Some backup systems use HTTP, so I'll just upload my files to Gmail over HTTP as my backup method." A "real" backup system will provide versioned backups and history--which would make your question practially obsolete.:)
    – Flimzy
    Jun 22, 2011 at 9:55
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From the rsync manual:

If the sending side detects any I/O errors, then the deletion of any files at the destination will be automatically disabled. This is to prevent temporary filesystem failures (such as NFS errors) on the sending side from causing a massive deletion of files on the destination. You can override this with the --ignore-errors option.

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    Does this include all the possible range of disk errors, or only when there is a hard failure?<br> Disk errors can be strange, you can see the list of some files, but a part of it could be corrupted and so on.
    – enedene
    Jun 22, 2011 at 9:44

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