rsync creating 0 byte files on cifs mounted drive

Question

Hi I have been using rsync successfully to backup files from my external drive to a cifs mounted shared drive since Ubuntu 10.04

Now with 13.04 I am getting a strage behavior with the following command

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

The "MyDFSMountedCIFSDrive" is mounted using options

sudo mount -t cifs //10.1.1.11/dfsroot/archive/ /home/MyDFSMountedCIFSDrive -o user=hari,rw,nosuid,gid=1000,uid=1000,hard

Now when I use the rsync command. The entire Directory structure is created . I have several files in sub-drectories with the "img" extension . The sub-directories are also created appropriately. But for the files in these subdirectories , I have a file that is zero bytes that starts with a "." and has a weird hex extension

Actual file

P_248509-A_060.img   36MB

Instead rsync creates (note the "." in the beginning)

.P_248509-A_060.img.CluiPK  0 bytes

Does anyone know what is going on

I can use "cp -R" and copy these files accurately. I have not seen rsync do this with my 10.04 systems. Any ideas?

Answer 1

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!