I had an interesting experience this weekend backing up some flash drives to another flash drive on my CentOS 5.2 home desktop.
My son had two 256MB flash drives and one 1GB flash drive that he wanted backed up onto his newer 2GB flash drive. I used rsync to copy the two smaller ones to the big one without any trouble, but when I tried to backup the 1GB files to the 2GB drive, I started getting massive "no space on disk" errors.
After doing this several times, I copied to files to a directory on my hard drive and then tried to copy the files again from there to the 2GB flash drive (removing all files on the flash drive in between each iteration). Same problem.
Then I did a cp -R of the directory itself from my hard drive to the flash drive, and voila! All files copied, no problems, except that now the files are in a new directory of the same name on the flash drive.
The total number of files in the base directory is 171, and the total size of the files copied was a little over 500MB, so I believe that everything should have fit just fine. The commands I used that failed were 'rsync -av /media/<drive_name>/ /media/<2GB_drive_name>/' (which worked for the two smaller drives but not the bigger one), and then (after using the same command to copy the files to my hard drive), 'rsync -av ./ /media/<2GB_drive_name>/'
The command that worked was 'cp -R . /media/<2GB_drive_name>/'
The only thing that comes to mind is that there were a lot of files with ._xxx names on the 1GB flash drive, so I'm wondering if they just overloaded the capacity of the flash drive's FAT32 root directory name space, but I thought that limit was 512 entries, not less than 171.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
mhr