Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

Rsync error 5 may be exactly what it says

I use (and love) rsync on a variety of platforms. On Windows, about the easiest implementation I've found is DeltaCopy.

Recently, though, I've been seeing a problem at a particular client running DeltaCopy, and only for one machine (which happens to be the box running the server component, as well. Wanting to rule out the obvious, I suggested he run a full chkdsk pass against his local drive. After that, we got a slightly different error message:

@ERROR: chdir failed
rsync error: error starting client-server protocol (code 5) at /home/lapo/packaging/rsync-3.0.4-1/src/rsync-3.0.4/main.c(1504) [sender=3.0.4]
Error starting client-server protocolRsync.exe returned an error. Will try again. This is retry number 1 of 5

Well...

Various sources on the net point to bad passwords, tabs in command lines, and such. In fact, I originally suspected a bad password...until I went looking.

All of the jobs for this machine back up to an eSATA-connected RAID volume. I have one directory for each day of the week located under the root of the volume. Well, upon browsing the volume's contents, I found that all of my backup directories (virtual directories, in DeltaCopy-speak) were gone! So, apparently, chdir did indeed fail, as there was no target directory available.

I re-created all of the daily directories, set it off manually, and it is happily backing up as I write this.

Go figure.

Last Updated on April 10th, 2011 by LewisR