Rsync stops working after a while - SSD shows activity

English Hardware
1

Hi,

I’m having a strange problem with RSYNC which has already cause data corruption on my external XFS formatted and encrypted SSD
After I run sudo rsync -aAXv --delete the backup start normally but after a while won’t move any further.

  • CPU load shows two cores at 100%, but the fan won’t spin up and process table (KDE) shows no high CPU activity
  • It however shows three rsync processes with 0% CPU load and one of them is marked as “disc sleep” under the CPU tab
  • meanwhile my external SSD case’s LED blinks and shows activity

Now after it got stuck for 10 minutes it started copying files again - at least in Konsole I can see it moving forward and the “disc sleep” goes away.
It works for another 3 minutes and then I’m back to where it stated.

What’s going on here?

Thanks.

David

2

This morning when I got back to my notebook I noticed that the HDD LED was not blinking anymore and RSYNC was completeley halted. The process was still active but no files where being transferred and the SSD was inaccessible.
I quite all RSYNC processes and unmouted the SSD. Did a filesystem check again which after mounting and unmouting found quite a few errors.

After restarting RSYNC using a different USB port and a different USB case it finally went through. But checking the backup with meld revealed that a few files where still broken on my external backup drive despite RSYNC showing no errors.

Hope someone could help me. It would be quite aweful if I had destroyed my backup somehow with RSYNC.

3

I would assume that it is your hardware and not rsync. And I also assume that you think the same because you posted this in the hardware sub-forum.

Testing the same with different hardware (SSD) seems for me the way to go.

4

How can I find out if it’s a hardware issue?
I’ve already tried multiple SSD USB cases and so far they all show the error. It did work with a basic USB to SATA adapter however, except that some files still seem to be defect despite RSYNC reporting the sync to be done without error.
Could it be the SSD or even the USB port?
Is there a way to check a SSD for defects under Linux?