Allegedly, on or about 21 May 2017, M. Fioretti sent:
I use rsync to have a full copy of that folder on an external drive,
connected via USB. This morning, rsync copied many new files without
problems, but at a certain point it failed. It left behind on the
drive a folder which "looks" empty, but it isn't, and cannot be
removed.
The questions are
- may this be a software-only problem? Maybe caused by "system
overload"? I also had a text-analysis script running, using all the
RAM and CPU it could get. Also, probably irrelevant: at some point one
of the kids plugged a smartphone into another USB port, to recharge
it:
I have found that sending a lot of traffic to a USB hard drive to be
unreliable, on many different computers over the years (i.e. a wide
variety of hardware and operating systems, including USB-powered and
externally-powered drives). It's particularly worse if you have more
than one USB drive connected. I'd frequently encounter things like you
mentioned. Part way through, it'd grind to a halt. Files would fail
silently in transit, files might be corrupted, the hard drive would
appear to crash, it would suddenly dismount.
Usually I'd just end up with aborted transfers, and just the last file
or two sent (if it was doing concurrent transfers) might be partial.
Though I have had occasions where all sorts of corruptions occurred.
I'd have to power cycle the drive to have any chance of doing anything
further.
Some USB drive enclosures are bad in a number of ways. Inadequate
ventilation, and they cook the drive. Crappy external power supplies.
Badly implemented USB to SATA or ATA interfaces.
I have one PC where plugging anything new into a USB port is likely to
cause something else to fail, particularly if that something else is
connected via USB. I don't know if it's power supply related, or if the
USB host is flakey and is easily glitched. But I've only got to do
something like plug in a USB flashdrive, and my USB sound device
disappears. And sometimes it takes a cold boot to get it back. So I
can well believe that someone plugging something into your computer to
recharge it could upset your system.
I've given up on USB hard drives. Now I use networked drives. They're
an independent thing. If my computer fails while sending, it's just
that file that gets lost. Not an entire filesystem on the drive. And
all the things on it are available to any computer on my LAN. Not to
mention that these drives are supposedly designed to be powered on 24/7.
So, should have better power supplies and ventilated cases.
- assuming the fault is not in the drive... how should I get rid of
that corrupted folder? I already tried unmounting and remounting, but
no difference.
First make absolutely sure that you have the right filepath, and try and
avoid using wildcards that might do something you didn't think about.
Then you can try the big hammer approach of: rm -rfd
The "f" force option can sometimes get past the system refusing to
remove things for obtuse reasons.
Have you also rebooted? Crude solution, I know. But if some process to
do with files transferring hasn't completed, it might be hanging on to
the directory that you're having a problem with.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64
(always current details of the computer that I'm writing this email on)
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is
no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages
posted to the mailing list.
Just because nobody complains, it doesn't mean that all parachutes are
perfect.