That is a safety mechanism. If there was an error, the lists may be in
error, and a deletion may take out a whole lot more than you want. Picture
getting permissions on a large section of the source directory messed up
so the rsync process can't see into them. The send list now does not
include everything down there, but it can be seen, and deleted, on the
destination. Generally, users would prefer to rectify the problems on the
source end and re-run the sync, rather than losing large quantities on the
destination end.
This safety mechanism can be overridden, by the "--ignore-errors"
flag. If
you're taking the default --delete behaviour, wherein it deletes before
the transfer (can be overridden by "--delete-after"), these errors are
in
the filelist generation stage, not problems of insufficient space, or
dropped connection. If you do, in fact, have a place you can't read on
the destination or source, and it should be that way, exclude it. That
way, it won't hit it and error, so you can both run your sync with
deletes, and still have it try not to ruin your life over a little
problem.
Tim Conway
Unix System Administration
Contractor - IBM Global Services
desk:3032734776
conway@us.ibm.com
hello,
"receiving file list ...
96 files to consider
IO error encountered - skipping file deletion
wrote 101 bytes read 2047 bytes 1432.00 bytes/sec
total size is 107673960 speedup is 50127.54
rsync error: partial transfer (code 23) at main.c(926)"
Why can't delete files?
Thank you!