[plug] Rsync issues

[Richard Henry]

Hi all,

I wanted to make a weekly backup of one of my servers, so I put in a new
drive.  The original one is about 4.5 gigs, the new one is 9.  I partitioned
the new drive into 5 gigs (/backup) with the rest as /dump.  I basically
wanted to use some sort of software RAID to sync my main old drive to
/backup every now and then, so if one of the drives dies I have an identical
one I can pretty much boot straight up into.

I've never used rsync before, but after a bit of a read of the man files and
online docs I had a crack at it with the below command and some weird things
happened.  To start with, my /backup directory is substantially bigger than
the heirarchy it was backing up, by about 0.5 gigs (I believe I have
excluded any recursion that could have happened?).  Also, I get a weird
error message at the end (partial transfer... ?).  Anyone have any
experience with this kind of thing, and can see where I might be stumbling?
I'm running Debian (testing), fully updated.  An explanation regarding those
readlink errors would be nice too! ;)

Thanks in advance,
Rich.

(/dev/sdb is the original drive, /dev/sda is the new one)

# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb4               766880     23364    704560   4% /
/dev/sdb1              1921156   1424244    399320  79% /usr
/dev/sdb2               577128    229644    318168  42% /var
/dev/sdb5               577096    156992    390788  29% /home
/dev/sda1              5044156   2311148   2476776  49% /backup
/dev/sda3              2490428        20   2363900   1% /dump
# rsync -au --exclude /dump --exclude /backup / /backup
readlink proc/2/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/3/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/4/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/5/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/6/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/7/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/9/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/10/exe: No such file or directory
readlink proc/11/exe: No such file or directory
rsync error: partial transfer (code 23) at main.c(578)
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