Is there some problem with rsync?

jhpgcj

Hello, everyone!

I'm using Solus Plasma, full updated, and, after configuring the desktop, I tried to restore a backup I had on a external hard drive. For that, I use rsync through the terminal, but I noticed it wasn't installed by default. Ok, so I used eopkg and it was installed. However, after using rsync, I noticed the theme suddenly changed (seemingly to the Breeze High Contrast color set). After the backup restoration was done, no application was opening at all. I couldn't even restart my system.

I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go to the command line and, after logging in, issued the command sudo shutdown -r 0. The restart was successful then, but, as I logged in again, the Plasma configuration was started anew. Even my terminal, instead of showing the usual user@machine, now just shows bash-5.0.

Was this caused by rsync? Is that way it isn't installed by default? Or is it just a random error? I'm just a casual Linux user, so I don't know much. So far, my system isn't showing other problems, but I will list them here if they occur.

Thanks for your consideration and for the Solus Team for making this OS!

nathanpainchaud

jhpgcj I would suspect the problem here is not so much rsync (I use it myself regularly without any issues) as the backup you restored itself. Seems part of the config you setup before restoring your backup didn't match well with said config.

Harvey

jhpgcj
It's not installed by default because it is not required or even necessarily what most people will use. People may have other backup solutions they prefer.

Not entirely sure what caused your issue, but I have used rsync for about 3 years on Solus and have restored a full backup within the last 6 months. I also use it to sync my music collection to my laptop regularly and never had an issue.

It is worth pointing out that the drive you backup to should be formatted in a Linux file system such as ext4. I accidentally backed up to a drive formatted in NTFS previously which meant that file permissions were not kept, which was annoying.

brent

Harvey It is worth pointing out that the drive you backup to should be formatted in a Linux file system such as ext4.

Do you find this good policy with rsync or just backup programs in general?
I ask because recently my grsync stopped writing/recognizing to my normal FAT formatted backup drive. I.E., they don't see each other anymore.
So I removed grsync. Could the FAT have been the reason?
P.S.I installed Deja Dup, it writes to my FAT backup, and I'm pretty happy with the deja package.
If the ext4 is 'best practices' for backups, I'd rather keep with best practices. Should I reformat?
Thanks for any info.

clasclin

Wow so many assumptions, I think rsync is not installed by default (at least not on mate version), and we have no idea what exactly command you run and what that change or update, but you can just test rsync and try in a virtual machine (virtualbox for example) just to be sure, and nothing breaks 🙂
If you can't or want to use virtual machine, you can always use /tmp as a playground. Try a few things with rsync and see if it works as intended

I'm just guessing here, but you probably change your config and hidden files in your /home/user (and potentially other paths if you run it with sudo) and that change your settings, PATH, and so on, that could be the source of your problems

jhpgcj

Thanks for the kind responses, everyone! The backup I restored was of my home folder, no hidden files or directories were included, just regular files I want to keep with me. But, in some way, I think clasclin shone light on the mystery: looking through my bash history, I mistakenly used the option --delete when restoring the backup. Since the origin location had none of the hidden config files, all the config files in the destination were deleted as well.

My bad, of course. I'm more used to make backups, not restoring them. I use the --delete option all the time when making backups, so I just put it in the command out of habit. It's rarely a good idea though.

Anyway, does anyone know how can I restore my terminal to normal? It just shows a bash-5.0 text. I find it very useful having my name colored so I can locate easier where I input my commands.

Harvey

rsync -avh /home/harvey/1.jpg /mnt/DataDrive 
sending incremental file list
1.jpg

sent 35.49K bytes  received 35 bytes  71.05K bytes/sec
total size is 35.39K  speedup is 1.00

 
sha256sum 1.jpg 
b88495b4bd53395333887354b549d5d61862051aae1bda6eddcb65fa19a27204  1.jpg

sha256sum /mnt/DataDrive/1.jpg 
b88495b4bd53395333887354b549d5d61862051aae1bda6eddcb65fa19a27204  /mnt/DataDrive/1.jpg

Did a very basic test to ensure it was backing up correctly. The files are indeed identical.

Harvey

Yeah --delete can be dangerous.

I assume your bash issue is due to /home/username/.bashrc being deleted. Its default contents are:
source /usr/share/defaults/etc/profile

once you've recreated that, run:

source ~/.bashrc

jhpgcj

Harvey Wow! Thanks a lot, that did it! I copied /usr/share/defaults/etc/profile to my home folder using the name .bash_rc, then I used the source ~/.bash_rc. I'm not entirely sure if that is what I was supposed to do, but it seems to have fixed the issue.

Harvey

jhpgcj
While that might work, you should be aware if the Solus team needs to fix something in that file it will not be able to the way you've done it. As the package manager will never touch your home folder.

The way it was originally setup bash would load your config from the .bashrc in your home folder which would contain the line that basically says, add whatever the contents of /usr/share/defaults/etc/profile is, to itself and then load any other changes you may have added to your .bashrc such as command aliases.

So you should create a file named .bashrc (not .bash_rc) in your home folder, add the line source /usr/share/defaults/etc/profile to it, save and run the command source ~/.bashrc as I said before.

But ultimately so long as you know things may break because of this in future, its up to you if you want to fix it properly.

jhpgcj

Harvey I've done as you said and it's fixed now. Thanks for correcting me!

Harvey

brent
It will not affect its ability to see the drive no.

As far as best practices I would say yes. If its just your documents you're backing up, it may not be that bad, depending on their contents.

But for security reasons, you do not want everyone being able to read the contents of ~/.ssh/ for example.

Theoretically if a file was executable it might lose that in backup and you'll need to go through and manually mark it as executable again. Read/write performance was also worse when my backup drive was formatted in NTFS. All around just better to backup to a Linux file system.

brent

Thank you Harvey for this great reply and everything you said. Grsync explicitly, as you mentioned, had a way to preserve those permissions across backups. I'm sure DUP does, I have to find it. I'm going to reformat my back up drive ext4 tomorrow. Appreciate it.

palto42

DejaDup uses duplicity in the back which will preserve the file settings on any target storage.
I'm using duply which is CLI based and is also using duplicity in the back but is better suited for system backups (e.g. can be run as systemd unit).
Another backup alternative I can recommend is borgmatic which uses borg in the back and is much faster than duplicity and more efficient. I have started to migrate to this tool and very satisfies so far (although I had no major crash to test it ;-)