rsync deleting directories when synchronizing

Liam Steacker
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:57:10 -0000

We have an odd problem with the rsync 2.6.6.  When we issue
rsync -vvrLxHpogDtSP server::image/ /

it deletes certain directories.

We're sync'ing to / because we don't know ahead of time which files
will
appear on the server.  For example, some init scripts get populated into
the rsync module, appearing ultimately as
server::image/etc/init.d/script, but we don't know ahead of time which
scripts will show up.

When we issue the above commands, rsync removes the /etc/init.d
directory altogether, and recreates it with only the scripts in the
module, thereby removing all of our existing init scripts.  [We have
checked, and the inode number for /etc/init.d changes.]  This is not the
desired behavior - what we want to do is add the contents of the module
to our existing files, without removing any of them.

When we simplify the command line down to
rsync -r server::images/ /
it still clobbers /etc/init.d.

For reference, this is under Fedora Core 3, Linux kernel 2.6.9-1.681_FC3.

Does anyone have any idea why rsync is clobbering our files?

Thanks!

Liam