This is what I have tried to use to back a usr partition to a backup drive. rsync copied most then terminates with a mknod var/run/log: Invalid argument rsync error: partial transfer (code 23) at main.c (537) I have tried different combination if var/run/log (with and with the trailing \) and other combinations. I want to remove this file from the rsync list to copy. /var is linked to /usr/var Also happens with pre1, pre2, pre3 versions. rsync-2.5.0/rsync -axW --exclude-from=exclude.txt /usr/ /backup/usr/ exclude.txt: /usr/src /usr/var/run/log/ -- Ian Kettleborough ian@idk.com