Permission denied for many directories with Rsync

Question

I'm using Rsync to backup an Ubuntu Server server. I'm getting a lot of permission denied messages. Is there a command I can use to see exactly what directories were denied? I could scroll back up through all the files, but that would take forever. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Run the rsync again, but drop the -v (so that you only see errors, rather than a complete work log) and add -n (which 'emulates' the rsync, saving you the time of actually transferring the files.)

You could also leave the -v, but use shell redirection to send errors to a different log. The following should work:

rsync -alv -e "ssh -l root" foo:/ /backups/foo/ > r.log 2> r-error.log 

cheers!

Answer 2

You could use grep to search through the warnings / errors - but you'd probably need to run the rsync again to be able to save the output to do this. (Or save your screen buffer to a file so that you can grep through it.)

What are you backing up? The entire server? If so, just make sure you're doing it as root, otherwise this will be an expected issue - as there will be at least several files that aren't readable to anyone other than root.

Additional details at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/rsync#Rsync_Daemon, including:

The rsync daemon is an alternative to SSH for remote backups. Although more difficult to configure, it does provide some benefits. For example, using SSH to make a remote backup of an entire system requires that the SSH daemon allow root login, which is considered a security risk. Using the rsync daemon allows for root login via SSH to be disabled.