On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 12:41 PM, MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote: > 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 Sparse files?? See the -S or --sparse flag -- NiftyCluster T o m M i t c h e l l