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I have an rsync command which does replication of sorts:

0 0  * * *  rsync -av --delete /media/VIDEOS/ /media/lacie1/backup/videos/

Is there a way to stop the rsync command from running if the source is not accessible (ie: not online/mounted)?

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Do you want this to be a silent fail or do you want to know if it's failed ? – Iain♦ Jul 15 '11 at 9:41
The reason for this is in case something goes wrong with the source, I don't want to mess up the replication. So, stop the replication from happening if the source is not there. – David Jul 15 '11 at 12:18

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You could try 

0 0 * * * cd /media/VIDEOS/ && rsync -av --delete /media/VIDEOS/ /media/lacie1/backup/videos/

which will not run the rsync command if the cd fails which it should if the source doesn't exist.

If you want it to fail silently

0 0 * * * [ -e /media/VIDEOS ] && rsync -av --delete /media/VIDEOS/ /media/lacie1/backup/videos/
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I guess he wants to get rid of the error message when the backup fails. Now he will get an error message that the change directory command fails ;) – Comradin Jul 15 '11 at 9:24
1  
@Comradin: If that's what he wants there are solutions but it's not what he asked for and nor is it impled. – Iain♦ Jul 15 '11 at 9:26
Test if folder is mounted: grep -q '/media/VIDEOS' /proc/mounts && rsync ... – SamK Jul 20 '11 at 14:35
@SamKrieg: lots of ways to skin a cat, thats a good one to know though. – Iain♦ Jul 20 '11 at 15:12
up vote 0 down vote

Souds like you're doing a midnight backup of your desktop computer and you're being spammed by the cron daemon about the failing backup.

The simple and crude solution would be to silence the cron, which can be done in two ways:

0 0 * * * rsync .. > /dev/null 2>&1

This will redirect stdout and stderr to /dev/null.. no mail from cron

Another solution is to define an empty email with MAILTO

MAILTO=root

0 0 * * * script1

MAILTO=

0 0 * * * rsync ..

This should silence the script, too.

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