When I run rsync on a Linux machine (SuSE 9.1 with kernel 2.6.5-7.9.5-smp), copying from an NTFS partition to a VFAT partition, I get tons of errors from "mkstemp" like these: mkstemp "/mnt/backup/lisa/g/Work/Mac_Home/CONFERENCE PAPERS/ISSPR/HLM ATT RUNS/\ .att19 out.m31kTI" failed: No such file or directory mkstemp "/mnt/backup/lisa/g/Work/Mac_Home/CONFERENCE PAPERS/ISSPR/HLM ATT RUNS/\ .att2 out.54lonG" failed: No such file or directory The NTFS partition is on a real Windows XP machine elsewhere on the network, mounted on the Linux box via samba. The copy command is: rsync -rtv /mnt/xp/machine /mnt/backup/lisa where /mnt/xp/machine is the samba-mounted XP NTFS disk and /mnt/backup/lisa is the local VFAT partition. Is this a limitation of the filesystems or an rsync bug?
I also get plenty of "stat" errors like this: stat "/mnt/backup/lisa/g/Work/PC/DataAnal/AttS94/Old analyses/CONFLICT.HLM" failed: No such file or directory
The problem might be related to capitalization of the file path. The files named in the error messages are indeed being copied (at least some of them -- haven't checked all) but with different upper/lower casing. Perhaps rsync is creating the file with one casing, then checking for its existence with different casing, and therefore the mismatch prevents it from finding the file?
This may be a kernel 2.6.5 issue: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=mount+vfat+case&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=20eL6-4Sl-5%40gated-at.bofh.it&rnum=2
Yep, adding iocharset=iso8859-1 as a mount option for the VFAT filesystem cures the problem. It's a 2.6.5 kernel bug.
Thanks for figuring out this is really a kernel bug.