rsync stuck with the --checksum option

Posted by billc.cn on Super User See other posts from Super User or by billc.cn
Published on 2011-11-20T07:46:43Z Indexed on 2011/11/20 10:00 UTC
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linux

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rsync

I use back-in-time to backup my Linux installation. It serves as an advanced wrapper for the rsync command.

Today I tried to add /var/log to the list of folders to be backed up and it caused some serious performance problems. The job seems to stuck on a particular file and the CPU usage of the rsync parent process reaches 100%. I then used lsof to see which file caused the problem and it seems to be the /var/log directory.

I did some googling and some experiments with the different rsync options and found --checksum to be the offender. Without the parameter, an incremental backup finishes properly in minutes. With it, the process will stuck when rsync tries to sync a constantly changing log file. This kind of make sense, but it still seems to be a bug to me.

Am I using the option correctly? Is there a workaround for this?

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