On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 01:07:21PM +0100, Ken Moffat wrote: > > Thanks for that interesting comment. I can see it could happen to all > of the backups (first I rsync to the other machine, then I roll down a > series of backups and rsync the "staging" copy to the newest of the > series). But surely rsync wouldn't alter the original tarball ?
It depends. Does it touch the original tarball? That is, is it responsible for moving the original to it's location? > How long ago did you give up on rsync ? The first time was about a year ago. The I tried again 6 months ago. After a few days of running tests on binaries (tarballs, etc.) again the md5 sums had changed. Every single binary that was updated on the server had a non-matching md5 on the client. I didn't note how many of the non-updated binaries failed (that is, the ones that were initially rsynced and then never changed), but at least some of them did. I gave up for the final time and decided rsync's proprietary algorithms just don't produce identical binary copies even if the altered file is in all practical respects the same and valid. > I just write a series of uncompressed tarballs, created from tarring up > filesystems. Now that I've got copies of everything on the second > server, it was easiest to create the tarballs there. Then I mounted them > over nfs and copied them to the old server ready to write to tape from > the staging directory. After the problems, I decided it was best to > take md5sums after copying : two differed (out of about 10 copied). > Repeated, this time copying with scp : one of the two was ok, but the > other had to be copied twice before I got the correct md5. That is bad. That sounds like a hardware problem. I would generally point to UDP protocol limitations with failures in an NFS transfer, but with scp it is hard to blame the protocol. Unless, of course, you have a flaky TCP/IP stack on one of the boxes. -- Archaic Want control, education, and security from your operating system? Hardened Linux From Scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hlfs -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
