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. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
