On 06/30/2017 01:42 PM, James B. Byrne wrote: > The setup is somewhat complicated in that the VAN > will not permit direct rsync access and so we establish the link via > sshfs and then mount remote location as local. sshfs doesn't seem to preserve/transmit ctime, so rsync won't be able to reliably determine whether a file has changed based on times. There's a small chance that you'll miss updates in this configuration. That's probably not related to your problem, just a note on that setup. Regarding the empty file, perhaps the source had the file locked for reading. Do you know what type of system is providing the data?